I have a great Rika pellet stove, but despite all the embedded electronics, it is unable to warn me just before the pellets tank is empty. As I already have my own low-power wireless devices and home automation tools, I just added a distance sensor and designed some enclosures.

I am currently working with BLE beacons -only iBeacons for now- with Espressif’s esp-idf libraries. The aim is to use the ESP32 as a gateway to published detected beacons to an MQTT broker. It was surprisingly easy and I will write something about that when the code will be more polished.

Anyway, by curiosity and to speed up development, I wanted to try microPython port to ESP32, and I did. Unfortunately, BLE support is not yet reliable enough and a lot of advertisements were lost with 4 to 6 beacons. This post is to keep track of my work and, hopefully, use in the future when microPython port will be more reliable :-)

What can you do on a rainy evening when you go to your hackerspace?
Take a NoteRF V2 PCB, a GPS, a battery, and you can make a LoRaWAN GPS tracker!

The new version of my NoteRF project, its features are:

• New radio footprint for RFM69 (FSK/OOK) or RFM95: LoRaWAN !
• Mosfet to switch off sensors or control actuators
• Edge connector for external antenna
• Mounting slot for 3 mm screws
• Fits on a breadboard
• 3.3V regulator

This project is to try LoRaWAN networks, I designed a simple Arduino shield with RFM95w: LoRa modules from HopeRF.