Today there is a wide range of offer for home automation devices. A lot of sensors, actors etc. can be connected to the cloud and be controlled using Google Home, Amazon Alexa, your smartphone, etc. There are a lot of companies offering low cost devices, e.g. Sonoff, Tuya, Teckin etc. Most of these solutions are based on ESP32 or ESP8266, and all of them send data to cloud solutions usually deployed on Amazon services, and the data is only accessible using the Android/iOS applications. They can be also controlled using voice commands over Google Home or Amazon Alexa devices.

Nice, but... my a...

LoRa (Long Range) is a patented digital wireless data communication technology. It was developed by Cycleo of Grenoble in France and then acquired by Semtech in 2012. Semtech defines the Lora Technology "as the DNA of IoT, which connects sensors to the Cloud and enables real-time communication of data and analytics that can be utilized to enhance efficiency and productivity".

To sum up, LoRa is a wireless data communication technology that enables very-long-range transmissions (more than 10 km in rural areas) with low power consumption. It uses license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands ...

There are lot of tutorials about connecting the ESP32 to a cloud service, but I planned to connect these boards using MicroPython directly to the cloud. That means, I didn't want to use a hardware or software bridge. I wanted to use the Google IoT Core, but MicroPython doesn't support JSON Web Token (JWT), which is needed for the device authentication. I tried to write the library myself, but it didn't work, because of the needed dependencies and the small memory available on the ESP modules. But, I found Zerynth. Zerynth supports JWT and using it, it is possible to connect the ESP32 directly ...

To continue the series of posts "connecting sensors to MicroPython", this article is about the MPU6050 (you can use also the MPU9255, I am still waiting for the Chinese sensor package) and the WiPy 3.0. Combining the IMU sensor with the WiPy and two micro servos 9g, it is possible to stabilize a camera (tilt/rotate).

To calculate the compensation needed for the stabilisation, I added the umatrix, quaternion and ulinalg libraries to the project to make matrix multiplication and quaternion to Euler conversion. The ahrs library from Madgwick fusions the data of the accelerometer, gyroscope (and m...

One of the most visited articles on my blog is the Getting started with MicroPython! tutorial. If you still don't know what is MicroPython and you want to start programming microcontroller boards (ESP32, ESP8266 etc.) using a small version of Python 3, you should look at that article . Don't expect to use machine learning or/and other big libraries (the available RAM and microcontroller performance is far away for that aim), but you can do some projects like these:

• Micropython: Merry Xmas & Happy New Year!
• Hacking: ESP32 and Captive Portal using MicroPython
• MicroPython: Geolocation using WL...

While I was reading my getting stated tutorial about MicroPython again, I noticed that I've forgotten to tell something about dependencies or packages.

Here is possible to find some MicroPython packages. On the WeMos (ESP32) or the ESP8266, it is possible to install these packages using the upip package manager. The WiPy doesn't have the package.

To download the new packages, you need to connect the board to the Internet. I take the WeMos as example and typing the following, you can connect the board to your WiFi router:

ssid_ = <your_ssid>
wp2_pass = <your wpa2 password>

import network
sta_...

It has been a while since my last post! Sorry, I was a little bit busy and then I was on a business trip in Melbourne for the CDC2017 and then I had a week holiday in Bangkok. I will be posting some photos on the next days!

It's been a year now since I started this blog. It's a hard job to maintain it up-to-date but I still have fun writing and coding for this purpose! So let us start!

Intro

The first video that I published a year ago was using the Wipy2.0 and a WS2812b led strip for some Christmas lights (click here). Now, this time I bought a WS2812b panel (100 bits or 10x10 pixels -or le...

At the beginning of October I wrote a blog article called White Hacking: WeMos and SquirelCrawl!. I used the WeMos (ESP32) and the firmware provided by Hacker Arsenal to do a captive portal. As you known, a captive portal is a web page which is displayed to newly connected users before they are granted broader access to network resources [wiki]. This can be used in combination with evil portals to obtain login credentials. The firmware provided by Hacker Arsenal has multiple limitations, e.g. the web page has to be a single file, without external files, meaning that all images should be integr...

I was surfing the services that Google offers, I found the Geolocation API. As Google describes the API: it returns a location and accuracy radius based on information about cell towers and WiFi nodes that the mobile client can detect. As I was writing the last post using MicroPython, I thought the WiPy 2.0/3.0 could be a nice "mobile client".

To use the API you need to get an API key from Google. As a standard user of the API, you get:

• 2,500 free requests per day, and
• 50 requests per second, per user.

I thought I could play with it to test the accuracy of the geolocation.

	Code: ...

I don’t have any Belkin WeMo system or Philips Hue light bulbs. However, I have two ESP32 running MicroPython (see my last article), and a W2812b LED strip, and I thought I should be able to say, "Echo/Alexa, turn on the kitchen light" or "Echo/Alexa, turn on the blue light" and It should work with this setup.

And... it works as you can see in this video!

If you are interesting in only using the code, then click here. Otherwise, you can read the complete story... ;)

	Code: https://github.com/lemariva/uPyEcho

If you’re not up to speed with MicroPython, Wipy see earlier articles in...