Once you deploy your IoT device, you won’t have physical access to reprogram or update it. It is critical to plan ahead and to have a secure mechanism for updating your embedded system or IoT device. Sometimes you will have the requirement to update your IoT device because of a new feature update, security issues, bugs, you did not have enough time to finish something on time and you had to ship your device and etc. Since we want…
Category: Hardware
Everything in engineering is about utilizing your resources. In our case, we care about CPU or memory usage of our algorithms (at least in software engineering we do.) Yet, power consumption plays a vital role in the battery life of our IoT devices. You will want to examine and identify what part of your code, algorithm is draining your power source. Nothing provides better results than an experimental observation that is verifiable and repeatable. I will present you with…
This article is the continued investigation of the Texas Instruments BQ25570, the MPPT solar charging chip. In the following article, I will present my field tests as well as their results. I tested it with two types of solar panels, of various sizes. The tests were performed indoors as well as outdoors. The results are striking and much better than I anticipated. If your starting hypothesis was right and your lab test results were valid, then your field outcomes…
The main reason I wrote an article about energy harvesting, was to gain some understanding of this wide and hot topic. One of the goals, of most IoT devices, should be uninterruptible operation. To achieve an uninterruptible operation means having an uninterruptible energy supply. One of the methods, to build an uninterruptible power supply, is to use energy harvesting techniques. This article will be an introduction to charging a lithium-ion battery with the sun’s energy. This will be the…
Since I had some free time, I made a step by step guide/tutorial on how to program the ESP32-WROOM-32 with the Arduino software. At some or another point I will forget the setup myself and this guide will hopefully save me some time and get me up to speed. Two short clips, each less than 3 minutes, were recorded to ensure no mistakes are made and the magic smoke does not leave your electronic devices. I hope it will…
First post, yay! That is it for the introduction. In the upcoming time, I plan to publish a series of articles. As you can assume, from the website name lab4IoT, most of the articles will deal with things related to IoT (Internet of Things, we are all in the hype cycle.) The articles will consist of diverse tests with various chips/ICs and their modes of operation. The selection of devices, ICs under test will be made related to building…