General

Hi, Dear Reader!   Just to note that we have had an exceptional first year! More to come …   Thank you!  

Espressif announced on 05/11/2015 the upcoming ESP32 chip:   While the specs are impressive a lot of questions a rise : Support – Espressif is a small company as far as we knew – would they be able to support both chips in the long term? Compatibility with esp8266? – The new ESP32 will use the RTOS based SDK and most APIs are said to be compatible with the esp8266 SDK.

A Teaser of What to expect from our upcoming WiFi connected 2 channel relay board. Web UI of the relay board Main control screen and part of the configuration Main control screen Part of the configuration Schedule editor Upgrade screen We will need beta testers if you are interested, please, drop us a line.

There are some products on the market of smart thermostats/controllers that rely on knowing the user Geo Location to act “smart” – is this really smart? When user is at given location there are several methods to figure it out: Active: Pinging an IP address presence Checking current WiFi network name Using arping to check mac address presence Passive: Listening for specific packets All above are good if you do not need an extra time to react and that’s the problem.

While working on a secure cloud for the gang of the esp8266 based devices we are developing we need SSL – real and secure. And this August is the month of the SSL issues , it seems , but thankful to the Espressifs’ quick support they are on the way out. SSL Memory Leak The latest SDK v1.3.0 introduced a bug that simply didn’t call the disconnect callback of esp connections under some circumstances and that in turn leaked memory.

Hi, I have signed the IoT Design Manifesto – if you are into IoT. You should too. Here is the link Sign The Manifesto. These are the highlights of it: We do not belive the hype! We design useful things! We aim for the win-win-win! We keep everyone and everything secure! We build and promote a culture of privacy! We are deliberate of what data we collect! We make the parties associated with an IoT product Explicit!

During the past weeks i’ve worked on getting the FOTA upgrades work on the 2MB boards by Olimex. The wonderful esp-link project by Thorsten von Eicken was a great example of two things: How to concatenate the espfs filesystem image with the firmware images. How to properly write a new image to the flash. It was a nice example to start with. So after a lot of fiddling with Makefiles, cgi routines and esptool – i’ve finally got the OTA working.

Engineering Internet Of Things Secure network for our upcoming IoT service. Goals: Security Redundancy End to End Security Secure Firmware Upgrades Threats: DoS Attacks DDoS Attacks DNS spoofing /don’t even think of DynDNS/ Sniffing man in the middle Security: Using a VPN -> takes the problem away and requires extra settup. Not user friendly. The only pro is that it can use an existing infrastructure if present.

Which goes where – when using a bootloader for FOTA. The files: master_device_key.bin – Obtained from Espressif Cloud esp_init_data_default.bin – Stores default RF parameter values boot.bin – bootloader user1.bin and user2.bin – user firmware blank.bin – blank settings , flash to get default parameters 512KB master_device_key.bin 0x3E000 esp_init_data_default.bin 0x7C000 blank.bin 0x7E000 boot.bin 0x00000 user1.bin 0x01000 user2.bin 0x41000 1024KB Flash master_device_key.bin 0x3E000 esp_init_data_default.bin 0xFC000 blank.bin 0xFE000 boot.

I’ve got a new tool at the LAB! The Box:      The Tool:   Having an oscilloscope is just priceless. You may need it rarely but there are times when you are just lost blind without it. The video lists all you should now about it and a bit more If you are considering to get one and you are in EU. I can recommend Silcon.cz – you will get a nice service there.