Tech Diary

Edge AI looks like going to be the next big things. In this blog post, I am going to introduce a very cheap and yet power AI chip based on Kendryte K210. K210 is based on open source RISC-V instructions set. According to Wikipedia ,  RISC-V  started in 2010 and in the recent 2 years, actual chips are produced with prototyping boards. A few China companies have started to build prototyping kits around this chip. One of these company is SiPeed . They have produced a few form factors of prototyping board and I have gotten hold of the Maixpy GO board. The Maixpy Go has the following features: 2.8 inch touch LCD Camera TF card slot Mic RGB LED Speaker WIFI Rechargeable battery Powered via USB C. The USB-C also act as Uart for transferring of codes and flashing of firmware. There are a few ways to program the kit, micropython, Arduino IDE or Platform IO. For micropython, there is Maixpy IDE which is a port of OpenMV IDE. Sipeed also has 2 interesting perip...

This is one of Google best-kept secrets, Google App Script (GAS). GAS is a Javascript engine that can link various Google front and back end services together. e.g. Periodic scanning a GDrive folder, detect a CSV file and insert into MySQL. The best part of this, it is FREE !!! Having said that, is there a limit? Yes, there is.  Quotas for App Scripts In the next few articles, I am going to demonstrate how we can collect the IoT data into Google Sheet and dynamically visualise the data using Google Sheet and/or Data Studio. For this simple demo, I will use an ESP32 and runs Mongoose OS to act as the bridge between GAS and local MQTT server and send temperature/humidity data from DHT11 to Google Sheet. As written in my previous article on  Mongoose OS , the connectivity aspect of Mongoose is very powerful. it provides simple and easy to use Javascript APIs which glued the underlying C/C++ library. To read the sensor value and to Google Apps Script, it needs less than 20...

Recently I was experimenting on the  Mongoose OS . It is an open source IoT platform for developing applications on ESP32, ESP8266, STM32, TI CC3200 and TI CC3220 microcontrollers. It supports a simplified version of Javascript (mJS) and C/C++ as the development language for calling the OS APIs. What are the features that impressed me? 1. Installation There is only 1 executable. (mos.exe) to be downloaded. Just clicked on the EXE and the web based IDE is displayed. Then I connect up ESP32 using the selected serial port, flashed the firmware and connect to my WIFI network. That's it! The MCU is setup! Amazingly simple. 2. Connection to MQTT After the initial setup, the connection to MQTT is only a few clicks away and the ESP32 is setup to send/receive message from MQTT server. Zero code for this entire process. Super impressed!! Publishing to the MQTT is only a single line of code. load('api_mqtt.js'); let topic = 'myesp32/topic'; let...

My family is moving to a new home soon. I was thinking of setting up a smart home system for my new home. After looking at some of the commercially available solutions, either they are very expensive or I do not trust their security, so I decided to assemble and build one myself. In order to make the smart home modular and can cater for expansion, I have decided on the following considerations and design parameters when building up the smart home. The hub software has to be Open Source. The switches, lights and sensors can be either open source hardware or the devices must be using 1 of the open IoT protocols such as MQTT, CoAP RestAPI. Open and easily available SoC (System on Chips) hardware such as Raspberry Pi.  Open and easily available software/hardware based on common IoT development platform e.g Arduino or PlatformIO.  The ability to integrate to smart devices such as Google Home Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Homebridge. Ha ha,😂😂 this sounds like I am g...

IoT and Cloud Integration IoT, Cloud, 3D printing, Artificial Intelligent, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics are all the current (at the date of this blogpst) hottest and interesting technology. In IoT, big players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have make tools readily available to us to integrate many of these "Edge" devices to their platform. Recently I bought some of these devices to experiment the capabilities and was amazed at how cheap and powerful. So much for writing and let's get on with the projects.