This tutorial helps you update a BRIO locomotive using an ESP32 that runs MicroPython. As a result, you can control the speed of the BRIO using a cell phone or a laptop (basically, everything that has a browser).

If you don't know what a BRIO locomotive is, check out the following picture:

Fig. 1: BRIO World 33594

In this tutorial, I will try to accomplish the following points:

1. Hardware modifications on a ESP32 board;
2. MicroPython installation;
3. Controlling the locomot...

This tutorial is about training (on PC) and deploying a YOLOv2 object detector on a MAix M1w Dock Suit running MicroPython. The MobileNet is used as a pre-trained model for the training.

Therefore, this tutorial will try to accomplish the following points:

1. A quick introduction to YOLO(v2)
2. A quick introduction to MAix KPU
3. Training, evaluation, and testing of the object detector model (on Jupyter-Notebooks running on Docker)
4. Flashing the trained model on the MAi...

Holiday season has begun and Christmas and the New Year 2020 are approaching! This means, time to reflect and to clean up code and, therefore, I am updating some of the GitHub's projects to summarize the year. I started with the Christmas lights project! But, this time, I took the M5Stack Fire and a new LED panel (WS2812b - 16x16 pixel) and with the XMasLight project, these are the results (Fig. 1 & 2):

Fig. 1: M5Stack and a new WS2812b Panel (16x16 pixel).

Hardw...

Last year, I bought an ESP32-CAM board from Banggood and I wanted to use it with MicroPython. The board has an OV2640 without any chip (buffer) between the ESP32 and the camera. There are many implementation for Arduino or directly using Espressif, but I wanted to use MicroPython. Thus, the only solution was to use the I2S interface, but I didn't have time to write the driver. Thus, I put the project on hold. However, last week I was searching between the ESP32 boards that I have,...

Last December, I wrote an article telling you that I was switching from Atom.io to Visual Studio Code to program MicroPython. Nowadays, I'm still using VSCode and the PyMakr extension. The latter enables the communication to a board running MicroPython using the built-in command line REPL. Thus, I can run a single file on my board, sync my entire project or directly type and execute commands using the Terminal on VSCode. However, I was missing some of the main features of VSCode, namely IntelliSense, autocompletion, and linting capabilities. Last month, BradenM contacted me and told me that he...

This is a 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 in...

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 – A...

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 i...

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 rec...

I was looking at my last articles about MicroPython and my new articles about Jupyter and Docker, and I thought if it is possible to make a mix between Jupyter and the ESP boards. I use usually Visual Studio Code to program the ESP but for analytics I use Jupyter. I looked if it was possible to connect the Jupyter kernel to the ESP using the serial port and: Yes!, it is possible. This can be a great tool to teach kids to access data from connected sensors and analyze it us...

Out with the old, in with the new! Happy 2019!

It's been a two years 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! I hope the next year will be better than this one! :)

This post includes a new video for happy new year! The video combines some of the MicroPython code, that I've published this year. I'll be uploading the repo to GitHub in the next days. But, in the meantime enjoy the video, and check the MicroPython projects here!

Quoting the official MicroPython's website:

MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of the Python 3 programming language that includes a small subset of the Python standard library and is optimised to run on microcontrollers and in constrained environments.

Besides C++ and C, I use MicroPython to program microcontrollers, especially the ESP32/ESP8266 types. These two microcontrollers are compatible with MicroPython and it is easy to integrate sensors and actors programming using this language. I wrote a tutorial about installing MicroPython on the ESPs, as well a lot of articles a...

LeMaRiva|tech wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! To celebrate I made a video using the Xmas-lights from last year, but this time I connected the ESP32 to a Jupyter kernel to control the lights. A new Jupyter-ESP32 tutorial is coming soon. In the meantime, you can track Santa and spend time with your family!

	Code: https://github.com/lemariva/Xmas-lights

This part 2 of the tutorial will allow you to get data from the smart power outlets and send it to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) throught the Google IoT Core and using an ESP32 programmed with Zerynth (Python). This data is not usually available to the user (directly, you need to use the power outlet application), and it is sent to the company servers.

If you want to check, if your power outlets are compatible for this tutorial, they should have the...

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 Androi...