Beginner

The i2c bus is used to exchange digital data between a sensor (or an actuator) and a mini-PC such as Raspberry Pi. The i2c bus is also widely used on microcontrollers (Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32). By default, the i2c bus is not enabled on the Raspbian distribution. We will activate it …

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The Raspberry Pi Zero W comes with a GPIO connector to be soldered on the PCB itself. This is a step that can be frightening when you start. In this tutorial we will learn which hardware to use and how to weld the connector properly and safely for the Pi …

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In the introductory article to the PlatformIO IDE, we installed PIO with the Open Source text editor of GitHub Atom. Like many projects, Atom is no longer available for older Intel x86 32-bit processors. If you want to recycle an old PC into a development platform under Linux (Ubuntu for …

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The GY-302 from CJMCU is an I2C board that allows you to measure the amount of light using the BH1750 photodetector. We will use the measured brightness to construct an ambient lighting quality indicator based on European Standard EN 12464-1. It is very easy to integrate the sensor GY-302 in …

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PlatformIO is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code (also called VSCode) from Microsoft. VSCode is a free lightweight code editor for Windows, MacOS, 32-bit Linux and 64-bit. Installing the PlatformIO extension for VSCode is a good alternative to the official Atom-based solution. VSCode is a code editor much …

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The Air Quality Index (IAQ) is fairly easy to determine using an Arduino (or ESP8266) and a DSM501 sensor. The DSM501A is a detector capable of measuring the presence of fine particles in suspension in the atmosphere according to PM2.5 and PM10 standards. The DSM501A is a very economical sensor …

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The Arduino IDE is available on major operating systems and of course on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. The Arduino IDE is available for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux. This is the opportunity to recycle an old PC running Windows XP to get you started programming the Arduino, …

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The Lite version of Raspbian Jessie is very well suited to the limited resources of the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Node-RED is pre-installed on the version integrating the Pixel graphics desktop but this is not the case for the Lite version. Fortunately, there is an installation script now that takes …

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The Espressif Development Kit for ESP32 boards is available on GitHub for macOS, Windows, 32-bit Linux, 64-bit and ARM chips (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, etc …). It is still under development but can be installed to program ESP32-based development boards directly from the Arduino IDE. In this tutorial, we will …

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Today, I propose to discover the Shield Motor I2C for Wemos D1 Mini. This small shield built around the Toshiba TB6612FNG driver allows to control 2 DC motors. The board is capable of independently controlling the speed and direction of each motor (A, B). The maximum permissible power is 1.2A …

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