Sometimes you get a piece of hardware and you don’t have any documentation about it. Or even worse, the documentation is just wrong. How can you reverse engineer pin allocations of such a device? Here are a couple of tricks on how you can that sensor or actuator to work.
Continue reading Reverse Engineering Pin Allocations
There is a reason the title of this post specifically says “Embed Binary Data on ESP32“. This suggests that it is different than embedding binary data on let’s say ESP8266. Yes indeed, that’s part of the story. The other is that to embed binary data on ESP32 you don’t need to jump through hoops anymore like on ESP8266. Instead, you will do what likely feels most natural: store the binary data in a file in the project directory and have the compiler slurp it from there. Easy as pie!
Continue reading Embed Binary Data on ESP32You will learn a lot if you attend a ThingPulse IoT workshop. Guaranteed! However, with every workshop we learn something new as well. Find out about a few of the topics below.
We recently ran a full-day workshop at the CH Open workshop days on the beautiful HSR campus in Rapperswil. We had submitted two workshops but the one that got accepted was “You’ve Got Mail – Advanced IoT with ESP32”. We had a really cool crowd of eleven software developers most of whom coming from Java-like backend developer positions. There were a few guys with hardware and C/C++ background which was fantastics. They corrected us on C++ subtleties we hadn’t mastered yet ourselves.
Continue reading ESP32 workshop – what you learn
ThingPulse helps you – and your friends, co-workers, or your children – to get started with the Internet of Things. We have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience with both hardware and software over the last few years. As we are also experienced educators, speakers and presenters running informative workshops is a natural extension to our product portfolio.
Last week we were given the opportunity to lead two workshops embedded in other events. Two workshops with different
Do you know this situation: you are listening to a playlist from Spotify on your stereo but just can’t figure out who is singing that song? Since you are sitting comfortably on your couch (too far away from your stereo) you think how this problem could be solved with some clever engineering. You quickly draw up a mental design in your head: a ESP8266 based device connects over the net to Spotify. Then every few seconds it downloads information about the currently played song. Maybe some cover art too and display it on a color display! It can’t be THAT hard, right? This post explains the challenges I faced when implementing the ESP8266 Spotify remote and how I solved them.
Continue reading The ESP8266 Spotify Remote – Engineering Challenges
This is a sequel to the previous post “Weather Underground no longer providing free API keys.” We would like to fill you in on what has happened since and how we rode that storm.
Disaster struck in the evening of Thursday May 16th in the form of a private message from David “G6EJD” Bird to me. David, a passionate amateur radio & weather station operator and electronics engineer, is active on GitHub as G6EJD and has been contributing a lot to the ThingPulse open-source projects. The email started with:
I thought I’d give you advanced information, although you may already know, that Weather Underground are no-longer issuing a free Developers Licence and so new customers can no-longer download weather data.
The implications became clear in an instant – and they were far reaching.
Continue reading Welcome OpenWeatherMap, bye bye Wunderground
The open-source software that ThingPulse provides for its devices relies on weather data pulled from Weather Underground. The standard setup process involves creating a Wunderground API key (documented in our guides). The usage was free for up to 500 requests per day or 10 requests per minute.
In the evening of May 15th The Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM, announced that it will no longer provide free weather API keys. There was no prior announcement and the change became effective immediately. It is unclear for how long existing keys will still be valid. As not even the tens of thousand of weather station owners who deliver their data to Wunderground for free will get a key to read their data back the uproar in the community is big.
For our customers this means that unless they already obtained a key from Wunderground they cannot use the ready-made software for the ThingPulse kits. We are very sorry, and furious, about this development but our hands are tied. The promise to our customers is that we will be working hard and not rest until we can offer an adequate alternative integration.
We started working on a new service integration on May 19th. Stay tuned.
Update 2018-06-11
Read the sequel here: Welcome OpenWeatherMap, bye bye Wunderground
In the last few years all big IT companies have discovered the Internet-of-Things field in one way or the other. Apple and Google have offerings for home automation, Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer services to connect IoT devices to the cloud. For one of our projects we wanted to take a look at Microsofts Azure IoT Hub solution. Microsoft offers comprehensive libraries to connect the ESP8266 to the Azure cloud. But what about the ESP32? In this post we’ll describe how to create a shared access token for the Azure cloud. We’ll further cover how to use this token to send a minimalistic request with the ESP32 to the Azure IoT hub.
Continue reading How To Connect your ESP32 to the Azure IoT Cloud over REST
In light of our recent power-consumption related posts 1 & 2 it seemed logical to ask ourselves about max deep sleep for ESP8266. Yet, it took a comment from a curious reader to set things in motion. I replied
…the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer is 4294967295 or 0xffffffff. Hence, the max deep sleep interval appears to be ~71 minutes.
You can’t argue with that first statement but the second is a bit in the air without clear evidence. My co-founder Dani quite rightly then asked “are you sure, didn’t they change that recently?” (“they” being Espressif and/or the Arduino devs).
So then, what is the current max deep sleep for ESP8266 i.e. the maximum duration the ESP8266 can sleep deeply – and still wake up afterwards.
In the last post I showed you how you can use cheap hardware to get a reasonable good power consumption test rig. In this post we are going to use this tool to improve the runtime of the ESPaper significantly. The short trial and error cycle possible with this tool will let us validate several ideas for improvement in only very little time. Continue reading 5 Hacks to Prolong your ESPaper’s Battery Run-Time
