31–40 of 44 posts
Is there an hobby equivalent for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)? Wifi tends to be power hungry for battery-operated devices. With BLE, you can get months of lifespan while still being able to connect to it with your phone. I was looking at the micro:bit, but it's still $15. Anything in the $2 range for BLE?
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Try the ESP32, it might fit the bill, although I've never worked with its Bluetooth capabilities and don't know much about them.
I've experimented with those ESP32 chips from a few sources on a handful of boards (lots of cheapo knockoffs floating around) and haven't been happy with the performance or reliability of any of them for BLE. So far Nordic nRF52 holds the lead in my experience (they do cost a bit more though).
I don't get why DIY/Maker folks are so extremely bent on finding and buying the cheapest shit from China in every regard of their builds.
Are you serious? It make it easier for everyone to get into, especially kids. Also makes it so you can use it on small projects that might not work and not worry about it failing, or losing it.
https://www.hackster.io/erictsai/lora-tooth-small-ble-sensor...
It's cheap but what's the 0power consumption? This tutorial from Eric Tsai covers a similar architecture but a lot more extensible, with a lot more explanation, and each end node can be powered from a coin cell for many years: https://www.hackster.io/erictsai/lora-tooth-small-ble-sensor...
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I use this in about ten devices (one of which is a custom-built dog feeder) and love it. I hate using closed-source IoT devices and this is a perfect alternative.
Please do tell more! Is there a blog?
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The ESP8266 is wifi. The slightly more expensive ESP32 adds Bluetooth and some extra features. You can use them to run mini web server, MQTT, etc. Think of them like a supercharged Arduino with connectivity built in.
Ahh - so coupled with whatever sensor you have, you can have a wifi broadcast capability at extreme low cost... So, ostensibly - if you have these all participate in an SSID of e.g. "sensors", then you can place these all over and have a low-cost mechanism to deliver the reads to your (already) existing wifi infra... So the key, then, is the family of sensor types you want to place on them. The limitations in the cas…
Most boards and sensors use either 5 or 3.3 volts DC.
You can put the device in a sleep or hibernate mode and have it only connect to wifi periodically or when triggered.
Also, using encryption, like WPA2 increases battery use.
It's cheap but what's the 0power consumption? This tutorial from Eric Tsai covers a similar architecture but a lot more extensible, with a lot more explanation, and each end node can be powered from a coin cell for many years: https://www.hackster.io/erictsai/lora-tooth-small-ble-sensor...
It's cheap but what's the 0power consumption? This tutorial from Eric Tsai covers a similar architecture but a lot more extensible, with a lot more explanation, and each end node can be powered from a coin cell for many years: https://www.hackster.io/erictsai/lora-tooth-small-ble-sensor...
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I've experimented with those ESP32 chips from a few sources on a handful of boards (lots of cheapo knockoffs floating around) and haven't been happy with the performance or reliability of any of them for BLE. So far Nordic nRF52 holds the lead in my experience (they do cost a bit more though).
Nordic is good, but STM32 is also affordable and quite decent.