A friend of mine asked me for some help on an Akeru device: it is an Arduino + Sigfox modem.

After a few tinkering, we succeed to do what he wanted and share it: gather some sensor data and collect it in a PHP webpage. The Arduino code is quite easy thanks to the Akeru library, but Sigfox callback is a bit more tricky. The callback will be parsed by a PHP script on my friend’s server, but I also played a bit with it to able to use ioPush, my IoT logger/push notification server.

I recently bought a Wipy development board to try MicroPython as a friend of mine is a big fan, and I whet a TI CC3200 (ARM Cortex-M4+wifi) development board even if I prefer to develop it in C.

Here is just a snippet allowing to ground or set to 3.3V GP4 in order to connect to home WLAN or set the card as an access point. Great for on-the-go development!

I recently discussed with some friends about sensors to record jump heights and hang time when kitesurfing. They are really expensive and requires to wear a phone in a waterproof case. As it is a useless sensor and I just wanted to have some fun: I tried with a cheap sensor, an µC, and some EEPROM, no need to be accurate to the centimeter…

As I like to have plants at home but always forgot to water them, I bought a cheap resistive soil moisture sensor. Actually, it is just two strips of copper wired as a voltage divider with a 10k resistor, the IC is used as a comparator to have a “digital” output, with a threshold set by the trimpot.