Author: Mathieu Stephan

180 Articles

Micro Python Now Runs On The ESP8266 – Contributors Wanted To Get Wifi Working

November 29, 2014 by 15 Comments

[Damien] sent us a quick email to let us know that Micro Python, a lean and fast implementation of the Python scripting language on microcontrollers is now running on the ESP8266. You may remember him from his interview on Hackaday, back when Micro Python was still at the crowdfunding stage. His campaign gathered £97k (for a £15k objective) and its comment section let us know that the backers are very happy with what he delivered.

As the very cheap ESP8266 Wifi module is gathering a lot of attention, he implemented support for it. You may use the dedicated files in the main repository ESP8266 folder  together with esp-open-sdk or simply use the precompiled binary available here. Unfortunately the software doesn’t have WiFi support yet, as it’s only a Python REPL prompt over UART at the moment. Contributors are therefore welcome to help speed up the development!

A Breakout Board For The ESP8266-03

November 28, 2014 by 32 Comments

In the last few weeks we have been seeing a lot of ESP8266 based projects. Given this WiFi module is only $3 on Ebay it surely makes sense using it as an Internet of Things (IoT) platform. To facilitate their prototyping stage I designed a breakout board for it.

The board shown above includes a 3.3V 1A LDO, a genuine FT230x USB to UART adapter, a button to make the ESP8266 jump into its bootloader mode and a header where you can find all the soldered-on-board module IOs. One resistor can be removed to allow 3.3V current measurement, another can be populated to let the FT230X start the bootloader jumping procedure. All the IOs have 1k current limiting resistors to prevent possible short-circuit mistakes. Finally, the board deliberately doesn’t use any through hole components so you may put double-sided tape on its back to attach it anywhere you want. As usual, all the source files can be download from my website.

Developed On Hackaday: $50k Reached In A Week!

November 10, 2014 by 38 Comments

Around 500 awesome people backed the Mooltipass offline password keeper crowdfunding campaign, raising a total of $50k in less than a week… which is nearly half our goal.

The development team and I would therefore like to thank our readers for their support. We were featured by several electronics websites, which definitely helped spreading the world of open source security devices. Many interesting discussions spawned in either our comments section or official Google Group. One new contributor even started looking into implementing TOTP on the Mooltipass.

Another hot topic was a possible smaller and more powerful Mooltipass v2, implementing other functionalities like U2F and encrypted file storage. You may therefore wonder why we didn’t start with it… the reason is simple: limited resources. Our project is made by (great) non-remunerated contributors who took a lot of their spare time to work on the Mooltipass v1. We therefore preferred working on something we’d be sure we could deliver rather than wasting $4M by making promises. We therefore hope that our crowdfunding campaign might allow an even bigger collaboration around a Mooltipass v2!

Ask Hackaday: Why Don’t We Have Flexible Displays Yet?

November 8, 2014 by 90 Comments

A few times a month we receive extremely well crafted crowdfunding campaigns in our tip line that make us doubt our sense of reality. While this article therefore isn’t a hack, we felt it would be a good place to start a discussion around OLED flexible displays.

As the dedicated Wikipedia article states flexible displays have been around for a few years already. In 2013, the Samsung Galaxy Round was unveiled as the world’s first mobile phone with a 5.7″ flexible display. The phone (and the screen) were curved in shape but the phone itself was solid. The same goes for the recent Samsung Gear S smart watch.

Yet for only $350 in a $50k goal crowdfunding campaign the Portal flexible wearable smartphone seems to have all the answers. It is scratch & shatter proof, water-resistant, flexible, includes a ‘Portal proprietary flexible battery’, the ‘Fastest multi-core CPU’, gyro, compass, barometer, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS…. Specifications are even subject to change to ensure the best available components… and it is 89% funded. As they mention,

building a smartphone or a tech company isn’t rocket science.

We also found a 70% funded €100k crowdfunding campaign for a watch bracelet (right click to translate) that will include GPS, Bluetooth, NFS (not a typo), a uSD card, a 4 lines LED screen and a battery for a few days autonomy… how surprising that no major manufacturer thought of that.

This leads us to the title of this post: why don’t we have truly flexible displays yet? We’ll let our readers discussion this point in the comments section below…

Developed On Hackaday: Crowd- Funding Campaign Start!

November 4, 2014 by 47 Comments

For a little less than a year open source enthusiasts from all over the globe got together to work on an open source offline password keeper. We narrated our progress here on Hackaday and always asked our readers’ opinion when critical decisions were to be made.

Today, the wait is finally over: the Mooltipass crowdfunding campaign finally arrived.

In some of our Developed on Hackaday series posts we noticed that it was tricky for us to convey the benefits of the device we were developing. The first 3 minutes of our video therefore explain good security practices and how the Mooltipass can help users with their credentials security. For our readers that may not have followed our adventure since its beginning, the campaign’s text will provide them with a simple (yet detailed) explanation of what the Mooltipass can do. Finally, our geeky readers will find at the end of our write-up a few links supporting our claims. We would have liked offering cheaper pledges but we unfortunately need to hire professional javascript developers to finish our app & extension.

Our Mooltipass Developed on Hackaday series therefore come to an end. We would like to thank you for your support and hope that you enjoyed seeing an idea materialize into a crowdfunding-ready product!

An ESP8266 Based Smartmeter

November 2, 2014 by 17 Comments

During these last weeks we’ve been talking a lot about the ESP8266, a $4 microcontroller based Wifi module. As the SDK was recently released by Espressif a lot of cheap Internet of Things applications were made possible.

[Thomas] used one module to make a simple smartmeter measuring the active time of his heater together with the outside temperature. He added 2 AT commands starting/stopping the logging process and used one GPIO pin to monitor the heater’s oil pump state. The measurements are then periodically pushed via a TCP connection to his data collecting server, which allows him to generate nice graphs.

In the video embedded below you’ll see [Thomas] demoing his system. On his hackaday.io project page he put up a very detailed explanation on how to replicate his awesome project. All the resources he used and create can also be downloaded on the project’s GitHub page.

Continue reading “An ESP8266 Based Smartmeter” →

Developed On Hackaday: The Answer Is Below

October 30, 2014 by 17 Comments

In one month the Mooltipass offline password keeper project will be one year old.

We hope that our twice a month Developed on Hackaday series posts allowed our dear readers to see what are the steps involved in a device’s life, going from idea to prototype to crowdfunding-ready product. The Mooltipass is the fruit of a unique world-wide collaboration around open source, developed by and for security minded people who (for most of them) never saw each other. Relating our progress here enabled us to benefit from our readers’ feedback and make sure that we didn’t miss important wanted features. Contrary to other campaigns that we often debunk on Hackaday, we preferred to wait until we had a beta-tester approved device to move to the crowdfunding stage. Our geekiest readers will therefore find the launch date embedded in this post, other may want to subscribe to our official Google group to stay updated.