eduArdu OSHW educational board is in stock

Right before Christmas we got eduArdu in stock!

All hardware sources and software libraries and demo codes are now on GitHub

If you come to our workshop this Saturday (15/12/2018) you may download and install in advance Arduino IDE, Snap4Arduino and the demo codes for eduArdu.

We made another pack of eduArdu named eduArduQS (quick start), two servo motors, LiPo1400mA battery, USB-micro cable, and pack of 7 cables with crocodile clamps for makey-makey like experience.

NB-IoT seminar slides and BC66 datasheets are online

NB-IoT seminar by Quectel and Comet had more than 130 peoples interested. The hall was full even with people not having place to sit.

It’s understandable as NB-IoT is one of the fastest developing technology.

NB-IoT is new, the standard draft was made in July 2015 and at the beginning of 2016 already has been accepted, just in 6 months.

For comparison LoRa is technology from 2008, but just last couple of years people start using it widely. The other LPWAN Weightless was announced in 2012 but first ever devices were made in July 2017.

Why NB-IoT was developed so fast?

Because Qualcomm, Vodafone, Ericsson and Huawei which are major player in mobile networking are behind it. NB-IoT works with the existing cellular network base station hardware. In practice it’s lightweight LTE implementation and just uses narrow band communication. So to add support for NB-IoT only software upgrade is necessary and it uses the existing infrastructure.

Another boost for NB-IoT is that it was first choice for IoT implementation in China as product with Chinese company (Huawei) involved vs LoRa which is considered technology controlled by US company.

According to Quectel slides they sold in 2017 36 million modules for about 245 million USD i.e. average price per module is USD 7 which is already in LoRa pricing range.

NB-IoT though offers lot of advantages compared to LoRa. The Narrow Band communication allow the receiver sensitivity to increase many times and with one base station is possible (from the slides) to cover up to 100 km with NB-IoT. Also one single cell base station can serve up to 100 000 NB-IoT nodes!

Quectel flagman for NB-IoT is BC66

It’s Multiband: B1+B2+B3+B5+B8+B12+B13+B17+B18+B19+B20+B25+B26+B28+B66 i.e. covers completely all regions US, EU, Asia, Africa, Australia and once you do your design you can scale worldwide.

Anothe major advantage is that it works from 2,1 up to 3.6V. This is very important as Lithium batteries capacities usually are defined when battery is discharged from 3.0 to 2.0 V.

NB-IoT is different from 2G/3G where there are 2A pulses when link to base station is eastablished, here max current drawing is only 250mA when you establish link to base station. Once established link do not need to be re-connected when the module go to PowerSavingMode and wake ups!

This is why their recommended design has just 100uF filtering capacitor necessary!

Another nice surprise is that in BC66 you have Cortex-M4 78Mhz ARM processor with 400KB Flash and 400KB RAM running FreeRTOS, which you can use for your own applications. There is also ARDUINO support:

Overall BC66 seems very interesting and we are dedicated to release OSHW boards with it targeting same applications like with LoRa: Smart metering, Parking, Smart City, Industry 4.0 etc.

Who ever have dealt with Chinese vendors know how they hide all info from their potential customers, in this regard Quectel made difference by releasing all BC66 info online after the seminar. You can view all presentations and the datasheets here.

 

First Steps with eduArdu workshop on 15th of December!

On December 15th together with our friends from TuxCon we will make workshop with our new educational board eduArdu in Olimex training building.

If you want to be part of this even come and join us, the event is free to participate.

We will show you how to use all eduArdu features with Arduino and Snap.

Be prepared to play games with fruits and people-touch, to make animations with LED matrix, to generate music, detect intruders with the PIR sensors, to switch on and off air conditioners and even create music instruments!

Educators may apply for free board which to receive at this event.

 

NB-IoT event organized by Comet electronics on December 4th

NB-IoT is one of the promising LPWAN technologies I review in both my Industry 4.0 and OpenFest 2018 talks.

It’s lightweight LTE technology which has only 48 bytes of payload and 30kbps up and down link. Some call it 0G.

NB-IoT is specified by 3GPP standartization organization, same which standartize 2G/3G/4G/5G. It works flawless with existing cellular technologies with simplified RF and processing.

With these high speeds and small payloads the average consumption of NB-IoT make it more efficient even than LoRa, but there is many things to consider in your design.

First is that NB-IoT never will reach LoRa price point, it will be always about x2 more expensive.

Second – some modules like for instance the popular Ublox SARA-N2  which cost EUR 11 for 250 pcs, can’t work at lower than 2.75V power supply. Most Lithium batteries capacity is quoted with battery discharge from 3V to 2V so these modules will work only with fraction of the capacity of Lithium batteries. They are designed to operate from 2.75 to 4.2V i.e. targeting LiPO re-chargeable batteries, but these will never stay charged for 10 years as NB-IoT technology promises, so this is really odd design choice by Ublox.

Another thing to take into consideration is the high current pulses which LTE technology introduce (up to 2A when link is established). So even on paper NB-IoT to looks better than LoRa it still could be implemented with compromises where these benefits to be not seen.

Fortunately some Chinese vendors (like Quectel) made their modules BC66 to work from 2.1V.

Comet Electronics is organizing on December 4th NB-IoT event together with the first cellular operator which implements NB-IoT connectivity in Bulgaria – A1 and with Chinese module supplier Quectel.

It would be interesting to touch and evaluate this technology which is relatively new, has no infrastructure and is dependent by subscription fees only.

NB-IoT Gateways are not expensive and cost about $2000, but you can’t use them unless you have licensee to operate at GSM frequency (and these licensees cost millions of EUROs at least here in Bulgaria) so you can use your gateway only in Faraday cage :). This is where LoRa technology shine and this is what makes it so popular! No subscription, no fees for data transport, everyone can run his own gateway.

This is also one of the reason NB-IoT infrastructure is not so well developed – the investment is small, but the mobile operators still can’t figure out how to squeeze money out of this. There are already several providers on the net which sell NB-IoT SIM cards with EU roaming and with low cost like $12 per year, but local operators will find a way to shut these down and take their share.

eduArdu update

I blogged about eduArdu the EUR 15 educational Arduino based board at the beginning of October, the plan was to have prototypes in 2 weeks which unfortunately didn’t happen, anyway now we have first prototypes built and work on the software support.

We are preparing Arduino libraries for all features:

• scrolling text and writing images on the LED8x8 matrix
• playing single tone and multi tone sounds on the buzzer
• measuring the temperature with the on-board sensor
• measuring the light with LDR
• detecting movements with the PIR sensor
• reading distance to objects with Ultrasound sensor
• reading the Joystick status
• driving servo motors connected to the two  connectors
• reading audio signals via microphone
• driving RGB and the red LEDs on board
• reading resistance on the 6 GPIOs to implement Makey-makey
• receive IR remote commands and transmit IR codes to control air conditions, TVs etc.

TuxCon is preparing free Arduino day in “Prof. Asen Zlatarov” school in Parvomay on December 15th, where volunteers will teach students how to program in Arduino and make the first steps in programming and electronics.

TuxCon is non for profit organization and does all events free of charge aiming to spark interest in kids for IT technologies. If you want such event to be provided in your school please write in TuxCon facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/tuxcon.mobi/

Scratch gets lot of attention for enabling even very small kids to program with visual blocks. We though it would be good eduArdu to support it and add blocks to Scratch which to allow embedded board programming with Scratch.

I’ve tested Scratch 1 many years ago, it was relatively easy to add hardware board support at that time via Python web server running jango and communicating with Arduino fermata. It’s obsoletenow and in maintenance mode i.e. no bug fixes and developments.

Scratch 2.0 was re-writen in Action script and uses Adobe Flash technology for animation, really bad choice as we did try to use it several times with Linux and never succeed. This version is also in maintenance mode now.

So we moved to test Scratch 3.0 which is re-written in HTML5 and looks great, but unfortunately they closed the extensions for boards and now support officially just Microbit and Lego. Probably this is their way to get some money for their efforts. There are issues open from people who use other boards and wanted to migrate their old projects to 3.0 posted almost year ago without any action, so we really are puzzled after all this popularity they got, this is the best way to shoot themselves in the leg.

Fortunately there are many alternatives to Scratch, like Snap

It’s totally open for adding blocks and has tens of GitHub projects adding blocks for different robot platforms, Arduino, Raspberry pi etc embedded stuff.

So we will add support for eduArdu in Snap too.

Electronica 2018 highlights – AI, Smart Solutions, Communication and Security

Electronica in Munich trade fair is the most important meeting place for the electronics industry. Last week more than 3000 exhibitors and 80 000 visitors met together .

What was very visible this years is that beside the traditional big number of German companies the second biggest by number of companies exhibitor was China. There were both big:

 

and small companies:

Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Smart solutions, Connectivity and security were dominating topics among the exhibitors.

LoRa and NB-IoT solutions were present on almost every fifth booth 🙂

The slides from Industry 4.0 meeting in Stuttgart are online

Open Source / Free Software for Effective Industry 4.0 Meetup  organized by Nexedi GmbH  and hosted by Fraunhofer IAO was held on 12th of November in Stuttgart.

There were quite interesting talks mostly focused on Open Source Technologies and their possible use in Industry 4.0.

My slides are now uploaded at Slideshare.