Last week we delivered a couple of LightSagas to some of our earliest customers. Everyone was very happy with a product we feel proud of. Work however continues and one thing that was bugging us from the start of the prototype run was the problem we have in that we would like to keep the …
All posts tagged Internet of Things
Many small steps, one giant leap
Finally, just before the years’ end, we made the giant leap of constructing our first LightSaga clock (Technically it is the second if you count the original iteration made of wood). A lot of small steps were required to finally get to this point and we still need to assemble the other 19 out of our …
ESP32 Incoming!
I’ve been a fan of the ESP8266 low cost, high powered IoT platform and their makers, Espressif just announced that they’ll be introducing a new chip named the ESP32 soon. It is not just a new module with the ESP8266 on it, but a whole new chip featuring many improvements. The improvements are among others: …
On Air: Clarifying ESP8266 OTA
So those ESP8266 are awesome but I never quite figured out how to get the over the air (OTA) updating to work due to the lack of guides on how to do it. The SDK supports it and there is some decent information available on the Espressif forums, but it lacked an easy oversight on …
The OSH Park Experience
For the LightSaga project we have designed some custom boards that will house the Photons, light sensor, some capacitors for stability and a logic level converter. Nothing too fancy but a good chance to let these prototypes be produced by OSH Park, well known for their purple PCBs. One of the really awesome features of …
LightSaga
Time for an update on the led clock project by me and Wouter Jansen. A lot of things have happened recently; We’ve send out a call to action to all the people who’ve shown interest in investing into the first prototype run and the we’re happy to announce that our first prototype run is not only …
Lighten up your ESP8266
For a workshop I’m giving at my employer I’ve been wanting to interface a nice NeoPixel (WS2812) LED ring with an ESP8266. Using the NodeMCU boards without the actual firmware provides a nice platform that gives a small packages, with breadboard ready pin spacing & USB to serial chip. It has been a struggle to …
ESP8266, MQTT & SmartConfig
Having done a lot recently with the ESP8266 and the excellent MQTT firmware by Minh Tuan I found that there was one mayor thing missing in the whole headless module setup; An easy way to configure the ESP8266 while it didn’t have Wi-Fi yet. Looking around I found some code made by YoungBuger on GitHub which is basically …
Led Clock Saga (Part 2)
After writing my first post on the clock many people remarked that it all sounded and looked nice, but there was no actual picture or movie showing the actual clock mode. So, without further ado, here it is in all it’s glory! The colors are fully customizable but in my setup blue is the seconds, green …
Elasticsearch & Kibana on Ubuntu
For one of my personal projects I’ve been looking at Elasticsearch and Kibana for indexing and visualizing data generated by a wireless sensor node network, without restricting myself in future expansion of possible data sources or types. Elasticsearch is a flexible and powerful open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine. It gives you the ability …