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.

MicroPython running on ESP8266-EVB driving MOD-IO and MOD-IO2 relays

New tutorial how to use ESP8266-EVB with Micropython and to switch on/off relays and read ADC values on MOD-IO2 from MCHobby.be

ESP32-GATEWAY-EA revision with external antenna is in stock

Our popular ESP32-GATEWAY board now have revision with external antenna ESP32-GATEWAY-EA. Metal enclosure is on the way too.

ESP32-POE Open Source Hardware IoT development board with WiFi/BLE/100Mb Ethernet with 802.3 POE is in stock!

ESP32-POE board is now in stock. The prices start from EUR 14.36 for 50 pcs order.

This board offers Open Source Hardware / FOSS solution and building block for distributed sensor network with power over existing LAN infrastructure.

Possible use cases are Home automation, Industrial machine logging, remote environmental monitoring, access control, remote displays etc.

The board contains ESP32-WROOM-32 module with WiFi/BLE and Ethernet connectivity , RESET and USER buttons, micro SD card, LiPo battery charger and LiPo connector which allow board to work even with power supply drops.

The UEXT connector on the board can be used to connect many different sensors like:

• MOD-IRDA to send and receive IR commands
• MOD-RS485-ISO to connect to machines with RS485 interface
• MOD-MAG to measure magnetic field
• MOD-BME280 to precisely measure pressure, temperature, humidity
• MOD-LTR-501ALS  to measure light and color
• MOD-LCD2.8RTP LCD with touch panel for remote User Display and Interface
• MOD-IO four relay module for switching on and off devices
• MOD-RFID1356MIFARE RFID card reader

Si3402-B chipset takes care for the power over ethernet, it’s IEEE 802.3 compliant, including pre-standard (legacy).

Important notice, to keep board compact and as it’s main purpose is to connect to cloud different remote sensors there is no galvanic isolation between board and the power delivered by the LAN switch or router.

ESP32-POE has internal programming interface and you can program it with Espressif SDK or Arduino via USB cable. As the board is not galvanic isolated from the Ethernet power supply, before you connect the USB cable to your computer you should remove the Ethernet cable or you should use USB-ISO between your computer the ESP32-POE!

 

Espressif got new competitor RDA5981 dedicated for IoT and audio apps

Few years ago Espressif released their first low cost WiFi chip ESP8266 and turned upside down the WiFi connectivity for small MCU. They have been left relatively to no competition from the big Western chip makers who couldn’t match their aggressive pricing, but later there was semi successful competition from Realtek and now there is another competitor who is focused on low cost IoT audio applications but their chip is quite good for general purpose WiFi stuff also. The RDA5981 is based on Cortex-M4 inside

• running at 160Mhz
•  160KB SRAM
• 8MB PSRAM
• 4MB Flash
• build in USB 2.0 host interface allow USB devices to be connected to the module directly which is advantage toward Espressif chips
• Support Bluetooth 2.1 EDR + BLE4.2
• SDMMC interface
• 2x 10bit ADCs
• SIDO x1, I2C x1, I2S x2, PWM x8, IR, SPI x4, UART x2, GPIO with interrupts x14
• operating temperature -30+80C

According to the PR message their focus is voice recognition / audio play and they shipped already 200 Millions of these chips ин 2016. Looking at the features above they can be used for other IoT applications as well if their SDK is easy enough to use by maker community. The question is will be they smart enough to be more user friendly as ESP.

I check their web and even to download their datasheet they require registration :). I understand this as – we hide our product info from our potential customers as we do not want they to evaluate our chips. These registrations beside pissing off potential customers do not hide anything from their competitors as they would easily register with fake info and get them anyway, but obvious this is the way most Chinese companies work.

via Twitter (Thanks to Rudi!)

EDIT 10-01-2018: There is actually GitHub repo with the datsheet, so their web may be not updated!

New Product in stock MOD-WIFI-AR9271 libre drivers and firmware WiFi dongle

AR9721 chipset is the only one on the market with completely open source linux drivers and firmware, this make it WiFi chipset of choice for people who respect their freedom.

We have MOD-WIFI-AR9721-ANT for quite some time and it’s very popular item, but the 200mm antenna make it not quite small. Now we add to our web shop the version without external antenna. It’s with 85 x 25 x 10 mm dimension and have same working distance as the external antenna version.

ESP32-EVB now get much better

ESP32-EVB revision A was made quick and has too many errors 🙂 some were due to the non very clear documentation, like that we assumed that all ports could have internal pull-ups but  when we try to write the software we found that the GPIOs we used for the buttons has no such. Other were done by our engineer negligence.

We had small 100 pcs series from Revision A, but after all issues we encounter just decided to trash it and just move forward to revision B.

Now in Revision B all interfaces are tested and confirmed to work fine 🙂

What we keep:

1. Two relays 250VAC/10A
2. LiPo charger which allow ESP32 to work without external power supply
3. Reset and User button
4. micro SD card
5. UEXT connector to add temperature, humidity, etc sensors
6. GPIO with all signals available on 0.1″ proto friendly step connector

What we add:

1. USB connector now is also used for automatic programming of ESP32 so no need for external serial cable, with DTR and RTS bootloader mode is entering automatically
2. Ethernet now is correctly wired and works 🙂
3. We were surprised to read ESP32 has CAN and we try and it works great, so in the new revision we add CAN driver
4. We add Infrared transmitter and receiver, so now you can control all your home appliances with IR control like TVs, VCRs, Air conditioners, and everything else with IR control

What we removed:

1. second button, with all above peripherals the ESP32-WROOM-32 module resources are gone, there is no single GPIO unused left

Revision B schematic can be reviewed here . The PCB is now routing.

Color TFT 2.8″ LCD 320×240 pixel display board with UEXT compatible to ESP32-EVB is also coming soon.