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, Windows, Android, iOS) using Bluetooth, a base, a pen, an eraser, stickers, and a Bluetooth stick. Th...

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. A tutorial for the connection is available here.

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!

In summer 2018, Google announced two Edge TPU devices for machine learning. These are now available under the Coral brand. Two weeks ago, I bought the Coral USB Accelerator. It is a portable USB accessory that brings machine learning inferencing to existing systems and it is compatible with Raspberry Pi and other Linux systems.

Fig. 1: Coral USB Accelerator, Raspberry Pi Camera and a RasPad

I wanted to test the performance of the Edge-TPU on my Raspberry Pi3, and as I have every application running on Docker on my Raspberry Pi, I've created a Docker image with everything inside t...

Just a small post. I've migrated the blog from Pagekit CMS to OctoberCMS. Pagekit was a nice CMS, but unfortunately the project is almost dead, so I've decided to migrate to OctoberCMS.

Why I didn't choose Wordpress? Well, I hate Wordpress. I've tried a lot, but everytime I found that it was not for me.

So, I have a ToDo for you: If you find something that it is not working, please use the contact formular or the comment section below to inform me! I've checked everything, but I've migrated almost 100 pages (articles, static pages etc.) and all the meta information and probably I forgot some...

This month, I received the M5Stack FIRE development kit with a PLC base kit from Banggood to review (see Fig. 1). After using it, I can affirm that the M5Stack takes an alternative approach to ESP32 prototyping, because the resulting projects are almost simultaneously finished products. This is possible because the board is housed in a stylish and robust hosing with graphics display, buttons, microSD card slot, USB-C port and speakers. I tested the M5Stack FIRE development kit, and the board includes also a MPU6050, MAG63110 (MPU9250 on the new versions), BSE3729 and a PSRAM to extend the ESP3...

A good friend of mine has an old printer and he was always thinking of buying some adapter to make it Wi-Fi compatible. He actually bought one, but it was not compatible! I told him to buy a Raspberry Pi W Zero and build a CUPS Print Server, but he did not have time to do that, so I planned as XMas gift! I hope he is not going to read this before he gets his present. :) - If you received this as a gift, your instructions are here.

A big challenge was to make it plug & play. I did not want to have his Wi-Fi credentials, and he should not use a terminal over SSH to configure it. I looked for som...

This time a quick tutorial to control your WiPy 3.0 / 2.0 or an ESP32 using Blynk.

Blynk is the most popular mobile app for the IOT. Works with anything: ESP8266, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, SparkFun and others.

I found a library to connect MicroPython to Blynk but it is only compatible with the WiPy 1.0. Thus, I modified it and made it compatible with the WiPy 3.0 / 2.0 and with the ESP32 running MicroPython. If you do not have any idea about MicroPython, I recommend you to read this tutorial.

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

1. Install MicroPython (if you are using an ESP3...