IoT, Arduino and Sigfox

One interesting technology in IoT field is Sigfox.

If you want to connect stations equipped with Sensors, in the field, with a Cloud infrastructure, you need wireless connectivity.

LTE and 4G are not an option now. Too expensive, in terms of money and power.

If you need only to send few bytes per seconds, Sigfox technology is a really inexpensive technology and Arduino has built a great board for Makers: MKRFOX 1200.

I have tested it. This is a first article on the subject, in Medium: "IoT, Arduino and Sigfox"

The evolution of MY Home Automation

How to integrate Arduino, Home Assistant, Kafka, MySQL, InfluxDB and Grafana (and much more) and live better and healthier…

see on: https://medium.com/@luigi.saetta/evolving-my-home-automation-setup-af0323097d51

Again on IoT and Connected Cars (follow on Medium.com)

One of my preferred subject is Internet of Things. I love it, mainly because it is the link between the Digital and the Physical world, and I started working with Computers (well, a long way ago) in the final year of my Physics studies, where one of the goal of my thesis was to control a laser, a set of sensors and actuators with a computer (Oh, you wouldn’t believe but it was an Intel 80286, and it was enough).

Another reason is that I really see Internet of Things as a paradigm to build solutions with the goal of improving the quality of life. Simply try to image what in the near future could be done: better and smarter cities, buildings, more safety, a better and more comfortable living environment and so on.

Connected everything (Scooter)

As you probably know, I have been working on a demo around the concept of the Connected Car.
Therefore, I'm interested in everything around this concept.

Yamaha, teaming with Vodafone Automotive is going to sell connected scooter.

see here: Connected TMAX

Oracle Intelligent Chatbot MOOC

In the (not so much) spare time, I decided to attend to the Oracle Chatbot MOOC.

It has been not so difficult, since I had already an high-level understanding of what is a Chatbot and how our Chatbot (part of Oracle Mobile Enteprise Cloud) is made and working.

But anyway, as always, a MooC takes time, requires coding.

It was useful, tough and in some moments fun.

Have a look at the series of well-crafted video on Youtube, created by my collegues, on the features
of our Mobile Cloud Platform and Intelligent Chatbot.

Here it is.

FUEL_RATE not supported

One of the main features for this project was to be able to calculate the fuel consumption for each trip.
At the beginning I thought it was easy. Every car shows on the display the fuel consumption rate and, probably, it is reliable.
But, it turned out that, at least for now on my Car (a BMW X1) FUEL_RATE and FUEL_LEVEL are not provided (supported) from the OBDII interface.
Even if, if you look at the documentation on Wikipedia, there are the code for reading these parameters.
At the end, I have been able to estimate the gasoline usage starting from the Air Flow Rate (MAF). I'll try to dig a little deeper on the subject.

(My) Connected Car Project: some more data from OBD2

It is not easy, if you don't work every day with cars, to understand what is the meaning of all the data coming from OBD2.

One of the functionalities I wanted to add is to be able to calculate the gasoline consumption for each trip.

Until now, I have not found a measurement coming from OBD2 directly connected to this consumption.
What I have found, and I'm able to read, is MAF, that is the quantity of air consumed, per second.
The gasoline is proportional and therefore MAF is an indirect measure of gasoline consumed.

I have also added to my prototype several other data.

This is the JSON message at this point:

(My) Connected Car: another snapshot of the UI

And this is a first snapshot

The Connected Car Project has a Cloud Backend.
Data coming from the gateway on the car are sent, as MQTT messages, to the IoT backend.
Behind the Message Broker there is a set of MicroServices enabling: data storage, filtering, transformation, visualization and analysis of data.

Data are visualized as a Real Time Dashboard and car's position is shown on a Map.

This is a first snaphot. Not bad.

Documentation, the Open Source Way

I have decided to write and publish online the documentation not only using the Wiki contained in the GitHub project, but also using GitBook, where I'll be developing a more consistent version of the docs.

GitBook

My Connected Car: Python and versions...

Ok, the first test was OK, at the end.

But I had to struggle for some time. At the beginning, simply the communication with the OBD2 port was not working. A nightmare. And I had to do debugging "in the car". Not really easy.

Basically the reason was that the PySerial library was too old. I didn't know why. Probably python-obd doesn't check any dependencies.
After upgrading pyserial to version 3.x everything was ok.

You need always to test, test, test every time you make a change.

But, know I'm happy.