I was looking for a real LoRaWan experimentation on the field, not only a given open field performance where the result do not match the reality.
For this reason, I installed a Kerlink gateway on a friend’s balcony living on a high part of my city. Then I moved a tracker reporting its GPS position on regular basis and day after day I built a map of the area covered by this antenna.
This post details the results of this expermientation
During last Devoxx in Paris, I made a talk about IoT and Sigfox with my friend Daniel. Here is the talk (in french).
Once you have found the great idea of the year and you want to start implementing your first prototype it is time to choose the right technology. Some would say you should not choose at this step and implement both at end but in my point of view it looks like and economical mistake to do this way. Prototype is to demonstrate and final product. It can request another technology, for sure. But in my point of view the best is to take the right one at the beginning. For most LoRa and Sigfox are both equivalent or for some others one is over the other one, best depends who you ask. In my point of view, if I consider my 2-3 years sigfox experience and my starting experience on LoRa with 1 year background research on it, there is no magic answer. Context of your idea is the keypoint then you have some technical elements to take into account to finalize your decision.
This post will try to illustrate where each of the technology is the best and give you some decision keypoints.
Today was CES2016 first press day with 2 major events : conference on digital consumer market trends and CES unveiled with 125+ startup and larger companies presenting innovations & products.
For this second event, a large part of the startup were coming from France and they had most of the more interesting innovation ! that is a great news in my opinion.
CES is waiting for 150.000 attendes this year and shows about 20.000 different products. 500 startups from 29 countries. As Olivier Ezratty told me many time today, on the 500 startup 1/4 are coming from France, and represents half of the non-USA startup.
nrf51 ble stack
After building my first project using an nRF51 device from the template given in the SDK I was really disappointed by the result, I mean, it works but the code is really bad and hard to maintain.
The given examples are not really generic and if you have to create your custom ble service and characteristics you have to make many modification in a code that is not clean for all.
So my second project was to create a ble library to make creation of custom services & characteristics as easy as possible and to create a main file with less code.
Yesterday I made a conferences about Internet Of Things main technologies with live demonstration. Watch it on Youtube !
Ixys solar panel
I’m looking at solar energy to power IoT device that will be used in a car. I did not found a lot of documentation on what we can do with solar panel and what kind of energy we can expect to get with a such system.
This post will summarize the information I got on solar panels and measures done.
Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard
The SigRPI shield is a HAT standard board providing SigFox connectivity to your Raspberry PI. As it is not certified for this network it can’t be used in production for this usage, but you can use it as a long range RF that does not need certification. I will later details this with a project related to this function.
By-the-way, the purpose of this board is to let you play easily with sigfox. The raspberry-pi offering a really efficient way to code and to make prototypes.
The shield comes with TD1204 (including accelerometer & GPS) of TD1208 (sigfox modem). You can use it with the standard firmware or upload your own one.
The shield can be ordered in the shop section : here
This posts details how to setup it and use it.