When was the last time you were thinking about your breathing pattern or the algorithm that forms it (or does the pattern form the algorithm)? I guess it is safe to assume that if your answer is “never” or “it’s been ages” you will be like most readers. Also, if the term spirometry does not ring a bell with you: relax, welcome to the club. Spirometry is the measuring of breath by the way.
Continue reading Breathing LEDs – cracking the algorithm behind our breathing pattern
Using our Icon64 acoustic LED device we built a truly Swiss CO2-monitor by integrating a Sensirion SCD4x CO2 sensor – designed, engineered and built in Switzerland.
The SDC4x offers an unmatched price-to-performance ratio despite coming from a country with very high living and production costs. Furthermore, it more than breaks the size barrier in CO2 sensing. A CO2 sensor of such precision and accuracy in a <1cm3 package is unheard of.
We built the Icon64 with extensibility in mind from the very beginning. This allows us to react quickly to specific customer requirements. The Swiss C02-monitor is a result of this.
The Icon64 CO2-monitor is perfect for your classroom, living room, and (home-)office.
A student asked me yesterday: how did we manage to survive so far without?
Primary school teacher after introducing the Swiss CO2-monitor
With 27 students it takes about 15min until it blinks red. Opening the windows for five minutes brings the level down to 500ppm and everybody continues to work with peace of mind.
1st grade teacher
In order to make our devices more accessible for customers who do not feel at home with PlatformIO or the Arduino IDE we developed the App Fairy. The App Fairy is a self-contained app store for your computer. It allows to install and configure applications for our devices without editing any source code. Best of all? The App Fairy does not require installation itself. Just click and go!
Continue reading Install & configure apps with the App FairyThingPulse 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
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
