One of the most coveted fitness trackers of 2019 is the new Xiaomi Mi Band 4. Unfortunately, due to its limited availability, Xiaomi does not directly sell the Mi Band 4 in Europe or North America, but it can now be ordered in the China shops. You can get a very good price for:

• $37.89 at Banggood for the International Version (Discount code: BGM37) or
• $32.99 at Banggood for the Chinese Version (Discount code: BGM43C).

Are the Xiaomi Mi Band 4 Chinese Version and NFC version suitable for non-Chinese speaking users?

Yes, they are!... Check these videos here!. You can change the language!

T...

Last April, I published a tutorial about connecting the Aqara sensors to a Raspberry Pi without using the Xiaomi Gateway. To make that possible, I needed a CC Debugger to flash the TI CC2531 Zigbee Dongle. This debugger was used only one time, and then the Zigbee-USB dongle worked without any problem.

In this article, I will cover a way to flash the CC2531 without the CC Debugger. This reduces project costs (about $10 for debugger + cable adapters) and waiting time. Usually, you wait 30 days to get a low cost version of the debugger (using the cheapest shipping option). Let's start!

Hardware

The new Huami's Amazfit GTR has not only inspired me but also you. Now it has just been introduced, but can now be ordered in the China shops. You get a very good price for 149.99$ at Banggood for the bigger 47 mm version in the International Version. This supports English and Chinese language. The price is valid for the 47mm variation (42mm variants are currently not available) and will be adjusted as soon as you put the watch into the shopping cart (see figure at the end).

Get the Amazfit GTR now! (Discount Code: BG47GTR)

	Huami's Amazfit GTR 42 mm	Huami's Amazfit GTR 47 mm

On July 4th, I ordered a Raspberry Pi 4B. To be honest, I really didn't/don't need a new Raspberry Pi, I don't have any specific task for it, but I saw some cool stuff on the Internet, and I said: Ok, I need one! Thus, I bought the 4GB model on Reichelt. The expected delivery date was on July 10th but, I had to wait a little longer and I got it on July 17th! Everything was ok, and I got the following closed and sealed box (see Fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Box of the Raspberry Pi Model 4B (4GB RAM)

But, as soon as I opened the box, my joy faded! :( With a quick visual control, I checked tha...

This is a really misc. small article. Two month ago, I bought on Banggood two articles that I wanted to show you, but this time, these are not connected to an application, code or a detailed product review. This is only a misc. article to describe my purchase: The Xiaomi Wowstick Screw Driver and the TTGO ESP32 WROVER with 8MB PSRAM.

Hardware

Xiaomi Wowstick

If you are looking for a very small electric screw driver, then the Xiaomi Wowstick is an option for you. It includes everything that you need except the batteries. You need two AAA batteries and you can start disarming toys, clocks, cell...

First of all, this article is a product review which was/is not supported by Timeular GmbH or similar. I bought the product two weeks ago, because I wanted to test it. I missed out the Kickstarter campaign (2016) and the regular price for the octahedron was too expensive for me.

Fig. 1: Timeular application

This summer, the tracker is on sale with up to 50% discount and I bought the basic plan. I got an octahedron -called tracker- which connects to the Timeular application (Mac, Win...

I've been very busy the last weeks. I moved to a new apartment and I was living between moving boxes. Four days ago, I managed to put my desk together and now I have some time (not a lot) to write a new article.

Last month I've received from GearBest two Aqara sensors:

1. Aqara Cube
2. Aqara humidity, temperature and air pressure

These sensors use Zigbee and I connected them to a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian OS and a dockerized version of Home Assistant (DIY tutorial). This connection was made without using any Xiaomi gateway (DIY tutorial).

Hardware and Software

PEP-8 (sometimes PEP 8 or PEP8) is a coding standard and style guide for readability and long-term maintainability of code in Python. It was written in 2001 by Guido van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and Nick Coghlan and provides guidelines and best practices on how to program Python code. PEPs stand for Python Enhancement Proposals, and they describe and document the way Python language evolves, providing a reference point (and in some way a standardization) for the pythonic way to write code.

This tutorial presents some of the most important key points of PEP-8. If you want to, you can read the ful...

Attention Docker Hub users - Docker Hub has been hacked!

An email containing the following highlight was sent to the users whose account data may have been exposed.

During a brief period of unauthorized access to a Docker Hub database, sensitive data from approximately 190,000 accounts may have been exposed (less than 5% of Hub users). Data includes usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of these users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker autobuilds (full email).

If you got this email you should (and if you didn't receive that email, do it too ;)):

1. Change your...

Last week, the Coral team released updates to the Coral platform to "address customer feedback and make it easier to use the products and tool-chain". The Python API has now the ability to run multiple models in parallel, using multiple Edge TPUs.

Thus, due to the multiple changes, I updated the Docker image lemariva/raspbian-edgetpu which includes the Edge-TPU libraries for Raspberry Pi 3 B+, Jupyter Notebooks and some other interesting libraries (check the Dockerfile).

Fig 1: Coral USB Accelerator, Jupyter and some training objects

The base Docker image remained balenalib/ras...

Last week, I published an article about using Xiaomi sensors without a Xiaomi Gateway. The gateway/hub can be replaced with a Raspberry Pi and a USB-ZigBee dongle. You find the instructions here: #ZigBee: Xiaomi Sensors using Raspberry Pi (without Gateway!).

As you can read in that article, two repositories are available to connect and process the data from the Xiaomi sensors. Additionally, Zigbee2mqtt can be connected to Hass.io. Well, I didn't want to use HassOS (the OS on which hass.io runs), but I wanted to use Hass.io running on Raspbian, otherwise with Home Assistant running as an appli...

This week, I received from Seeed Studio a MAiX Dock to review it. The main board of the kit includes a Sipeed M1w which is a compact module like the ESP32 but based on the Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor. It is designed for low power artificial intelligence workloads, such as face detection, object recognition, or audio processing. There are two type of modules: the Sipeed M1 and M1w, the last one includes WIFI connectivity.

The main features of the MAiX Dock boards are:

1. Display I/F – An FPC24P socket for 8-bit MCU LCD
2. Camera I/F- An FPC24P socket for DVP camera
3. Storage – micro SD s...

This post is about data inside Docker containers. As I mentioned in the last post #Analytics: Docker for Data Science Environment, data in Docker can either be temporary or persistent. In this tutorial, I will focus on Docker volumes, but I will include some info about temporary data and bind mounts too.

Fig 1: Data in Docker container (source)

Temporary Data

Inside a Docker container, there are two ways in which data can be kept temporarily. By default, files created inside a container are stored in the writable layer of the container. You do not have to do anything, but every...

This tutorial allows you to connect Xiaomi (or Aqara) sensors (e.g. door, pir, temperature, water, switch) to a Raspberry Pi or similar system without using any Xiaomi Gateway.

This is what I will try to accomplish in this tutorial:

1. Flash the USB-Zigbee Dongle with the correct FW
2. Install a broker to connect to the sensors
3. Configure the sensors using the broker

Hardware

Xiaomi sensors use Zigbee for the connection which means we need some extra components to connect to them. This is the list of needed hardware:

This is just another small post. I was quite busy the last weeks, and here is why:

Next week (from April 1st to April 5th), I'll be at the Hanover Fair 2019.

I am with our start-up fine|alyze presenting solutions for IIoT and data analytics. If you want to meet me in person, just come to the Hall 16, Stand D38(1) -5G Arena-.

We are collecting and analyzing the data produced by a "model factory" of VWN, and presenting live results of our models.

Click here to find the map!