LoRa is a wireless data communication technology that enables you to transmit data over a very-long-range (more than 10 km in rural areas) with low power consumption. It uses license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands as the 169 MHz, 433 MHz, 868 MHz for Europe, and 915 MHz for North America.

In October 2018, I published an article about LoRa and ESP32, and I uploaded a project to GitHub. The project includes a SX127x driver for ESP32 running MicroPython. However...

The M5Stack is a modular open-source toolkit for developing IoT applications. It is based on an ESP32, which is the core module and there are a lot of stackable modules that you can use for different projects. This enables to do rapid and high-quality prototyping!

You can program the core device using the ESP-IDF framework, the Arduino-IDE, Blockly or MicroPython. Unfortunately, the BLE is still not available using the official M5Stack MicroPython firmware (forked from LoBo). Howeve...

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...