BLE with Bluno Beetle

Some time ago my friend Mauro Alfieri showed me an interesting development board produced by DFRobot and called Bluno Beetle (now Beetle Ble). It seemed the perfect board to start “playing” with the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology; therefore I ordered  one board directly from the DFRobot store. I expected to receive the usual anonymous parcel with…

ESP32lights

Today’s project, ESP32lights, is a smart device based on the esp32 chip. Thanks to ESP32lights you can turn a load on and off (I used it for my christmas lights) [checklist] manually based on daily schedules based on the light intensity [/checklist] ESP32lights connects to your wifi network, can be configured and operated via a…

SIM800 GSM module

Today I received from  Banggood a GSM module based on the SIM800 chip by SIMCom. I’m going to use this module in a future Arduino project that will allow me to remotely control devices. In this article I’ll show you how to test the module. The SIM800 is a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900MHz) chip and allows to trasmit/receive voice, SMS and data (using the GPRS network).…

ESP32 (28) – MQTT and SSL

Security is a very important aspect for MQTT brokers. In a previous article you’ve already learned how to implement authentication and authorization. The weakness in that configuration was that credentials were transmitted in cleartext; it was therefore possible, for an attacker who can sniff the network traffic, to read and use them to impersonate a legitimate client. Today I’ll show…

ESP32 (26) – UART

UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) is an hardware peripheral which allows serial, asynchronous communication with configurable data format and speed. The UART interface usually works at logic level: the electric signals are generated by an external circuit, following the standards of the communication bus you chose. For example the classical “serial port” of many personal computers is based…

ESP32 (25) – Oled display with U8G2

If you read my post ESP32, Wemos or not to Wemos you know that I brought a development board, that happened to be a D-duino-32 clone, with an ESP-WROOM-32 module and a 0.96″ oled display. This display, available also as a standalone module on several websites (for example on Banggood), has the following features: [checklist] size: 0.96 inches resolution: 128×64 pixels controller: SSD1306 with I2C interface power supply: 3.3V – 6V…