Make your IoT design on Sigfox or LoRa ?

LoravsSigfoxOnce 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.

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CES2016 – discover unveiled and market trends

IMG_4108Today 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.

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NRF 51 BLE library for custom services

nrf51 ble stack

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.

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Have fun with solar panels for IoT

Ixys solar panel

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.

 

 

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Get start with the SigRPI Shield

Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard

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.

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Backed Domino IO project !

Domino IO - IoT enabler

Domino IO – IoT enabler

I do not usually post more than a tweet when backing on a KickStarter project but as for this time there is a French guy included  in the project, it is a good opportunity to do it !

The Domino IO project is an interesting platform to connect one of your home stuff ! It contains a powerful CPU, the network connectivity and all what you need to quickly make your own design.

This platform is really looking like the SparkCore under steroïd having eaten a Carambola engine. The chip is provided for $10 on Kickstarter ; this is 2.5 time less than carambola and 2 times less than Sparkcore. Sound like the missing element between RaspberryPi and Arduino.

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IoT disruption, why it is the appropriate time ?

In a previous post I explained why the IoT is appearing in this period thanks to the network technology evolution. It would not be a complete analysis if I would not care about the social evolution. In parallel of IoT and technologies there are other rising trends : Makers, Fablabs, embedded systems, 3d printing and crowd-founding.

Take a look at personal computing some decades ago when guys like Jobs or Gates make the first line of code and solder the first micro-processors in their garage ; they just used the technological elements available that time and were able to make them doing much more than what they have been made for. They did it because they were able to do it. The same story appends in the late 90’s with Internet : anyone was able to code some PHP stuff and create a service in his garage thanks to this students have created Facebook and many more.

At the opposite, when smart phone appeared in the middle of the 90’s it was a technology that requires strong industrial assets and this technology has been limited to major companies. The smart-phone revolution had been the same opening door to programmer to an new area with applications (apps). In fact all previous hardware evolutions since the Personal Computer beginning was requiring huge technological assets to be part of it.

IoT disruption is breaking these last 40 years where only software were hackable by getting hardware accessible.

Let see why

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