Discovering the Pine64 LoRa gateway

Friday, May 14, 2021

Pine64 has been mentionning LoRa on their monthly community update (in February, for example) for a few months now and it is now becoming a reality : TL, founder of Pine64 sent an engineering sample of the future Pine64 LoRa gateway to a few people from the community (myself included), and I received mine in the beginning of April. Since then, the whole “Lora” project has been named PineDIO (Pine + Radio), and Pine64 and RAK officially announced their collaboration for developping opensource LoRa hardware and software!…

ULP (ESP32) : a simple example

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

The ULP is a low-power coprocessor (Ultra Low Power) integrated into the ESP32 MCU. It's a very small processor that can run independently from the main cores and that has access to the GPIOs, some peripheral and an I²C controller. The ULP is also able to run when the ESP32 is is deep-sleep mode. In this mode, nearly the whole MCU is powered-off, except the RTC domain, in which the ULP is built. It is also able to wake the ESP32 up. A possible application of the ULP is to acquire temperature while the ESP32 is in deep-sleep and to wake it up once it reaches a specified threshold. Programming the ULP seems very interesting, but even if the documentation from Espressif is very complete, I couldn't find a simple and easy example to learn how to use it. Here is then in details an ultra simple exemple : the traditional blink, which blinks 2 LEDs on the WROVER-KIT V3. …

ESP32, ESP-IDF, CMake & CLion

Sunday, January 13, 2019

I've been working with ESP8266 and ESP32 for some times now. Until now, I used the Arduino framework, mostly because it's easy : it provides a lot of services and libraries, allowing me to go straight to the point and concentrate on my own code. But I like to understand what lies underneath the top-layers, get closer to the metal, the transistors, the peripherals and the registers. For that, Espressif provides a well-documented SDK, and for which a lot of resources are available online. This framework, name ESP-IDF ("Ce framework, nommé ESP-IDF ("Espressif IoT Development Framework") provides toolchains and tools allowing the development of application for ESP32 MCU. In fact, the Arduino framework integrates this SDK to provide a higher-level API, and compatible with other platforms When I installed the IDF, I was surprised (in a very good way) to find CMake files! CMake is an open-source tool to manager the build process of a project, especially for C++ projects. And CMake is natively supported by my favorite IDE : CLion. So, shouldn't it be possible to create, edit, build and run an ESP-IDF project in CLion ? That's what we are going to see! (TL;DR : the answer is 'YES'!). …

Getting started with Neopixel (on STM32F4)

Sunday, March 29, 2015

I recently discovered Neopixels from Adafruit. These are cheap and simple to use little RGB LED modules. Multiple form factors are available : single LED, board with 8 LEDs, rings, strips, matrix,…). They can be driven by a lot of different processors (ranging from little 8-bits microcontroller to the BealgleBone Black, goind through Arduinos, for example. You can think of lot of applications for this kind of modules. On the net, I found people that use them to create high-tech jewelry, a luminous drum kit, clocks, and a lot of other very funny creations.…