Tag "platformio"

Unit testing your code is peace of mind. It has two main direct benefits that impact on your confidence about the code you are writing: Testing expected behaviors Avoiding regressions (i.e. breaking something that was working fine before) Unit testing embedded systems is a bit more involved since there is the additional constraint of the hardware itself, sometimes more than one device or even different platforms. Quitting (or not even thinking about it) is the easy answer to the problem....

I've been testing quite a few LoRaWan nodes lately for TheThingsNetwork.cat, some based on HopeRF RFM95W (over AVR, ESP8266, ESP32,…) others using Microchip's RN2483 (an old friend of mine). I have a RAK811 waiting in the INBOX but the last one I've been playing with has been the new Arduino MKRWAN 1300 (so new there is no product page yet) and I liked it, quite a lot. The device is one of the MKR series Arduino is pushing forward....

Tindie is a great place to find uncommon electronic components or weird/interesting boards. I use to stroll around it's products to basically see what's new. It's like Kickstarted but for real. One such uncommon and new electronic components is the Panasonic's Grid_EYE AMG88 [datasheet, pdf] infrared sensor. And I first learn about it through Peasky Products breakout board at Tindie. And if you have been reading me lately you might know I'm going through my own LED fever....

Following the bright path (sic) of the Ai-Thinker AiLight / Noduino OpenLight I wrote about a few weeks ago, now it's turn for one of those devices you purchase but once they arrive they are stored in the TODO box until they eventually come back to life. The Magic Home LED Controller [Aliexpress, also available from Ebay] is an ESP8266 based single-color RGB(W) LED strip controller. It works with every 5050 LED strip [Aliexpress] out there....

A while ago I wrote about how to use PlatformIO with PunchThrough Lightblue Bean in a post here on how to use the new Bean Loader CLI from PlatformIO. Of course the reason for that was not merely being able to do it, but having a agile development environment to do something useful with them. I've been looking for a paper I had read a few weeks before I started playing with the Beans....

Lately I've been quite busy with the ESPurna firmware. It's growing bigger and gaining some momentum. It's really fulfilling to see other people using it and reporting back. But at the same time it's very time consuming. Last Saturday I released version 1.5.0 with some new functionalities and bug fixes and I decided to use some of my free time over the weekend to work on a project that's been waiting for a month in the shelf....

My daughters love to talk to (or with) my Amazon Dot [Amazon US] in their funny English: “Alexa, hello!", “Alexa, li-on!” (actually “light on”). It's so easy to use it to switch on/off things at home using the fauxmo python script by Maker Musings. In his post about Amazon Echo and Home Automation more than a year ago he explains how he reverse-engineered the protocol of the WeMo switches that Alexa (Amazon Echo [Amazon US] orAmazon Dot [Amazon US]) supports....

Last Thursday PunchThrough, the people behind the LightBlue Bean and Bean+ boards, released their new Bean Loader, the application that allows you to upload new sketches to your beans. The great news about this is that, for the first time (!!!) the Bean Loader supports Linux!!! Yeeeha! So I quickly looked for my 4 Beans that have been sad and forgotten in a components box for the last 2+ years and put them to work....

A few weeks ago the 4D Systems announced one of its latest products: the 4Duino-24, an Arduino compatible display module with built in 240x320 resolution TFT LCD Display with Resistive Touch and an ESP8266 ESP-06 module on board. it looked like a great product for a home automation control panel, although the screen could have been bigger. Anyway I contacted the people at 4D Systems and they were kind enough to send me a sample to review, and hack!...

My MQTT network at home moves up and down a lot of messages: sensor values, triggers, notifications, device statuses,… I use Node-RED to forward the important ones to PushOver and some others to a Blynk application. But I also happen to have an LED display at home and that means FUN. LED displays are cool. Your team's score, your number in the IRS queue, the estimated arrival time for your next commute,… Now that TVs are replacing LED displays (like the later did with the electromechanical ones) they have acquire an almost vintage-status....