Tag Archives: Sparkfun

Xively Personal is being retired

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This is going to cause me a problem especially my Netduino based nRF24 Xively Field gateway which gets used in quite a few of my student projects. I’m looking for a replacement Internet of Things service which has http/s and/or mqtt, amqp support, C & C#  client libraries (which I can get to work on Windows 10 IoT Core & NetMF) would be a bonus.

From the Xively email

”After careful consideration, LogMeIn has made the decision to retire Xively Personal from its current line of products effective January 15, 2018 at 12:00PM ET . Please note that LogMeIn will continue to offer our Xively Enterprise edition – there is no change to that edition and we will continue to support that platform as part of our IoT business.

Retiring a product is never an easy decision, and we recognize it does introduce potential challenges to active users. So we want to make sure you have all the information you need to make as seamless a transition as possible.

Access to your account:
Your Xively Personal account will remain active until January 15th. Please note that devices will not be accessible via the Xively Personal service once it is retired.

Transferring your products to another IoT service:
Should you choose to switch to another service, there are essentially two options.

1) Migrate to Xively Enterprise: The latest Enterprise version of Xively is built on a more modern and reliable architecture, which brings the benefits of pre-built hardware integrations, identity and device management features, MQTT messaging, and best-in-class security, but it may require some reconfiguring of your current devices. We do offer a 30 day free trial of Xively Enterprise should you want to try it out for yourself.

2) Migrate to another free service: If your use is primarily for experimenting and personal projects, there are several free IoT platform options on the market, such as Adafruit, Thingspeak, or SparkFun.”

One of the suggestions – Sparkfun Phant has been retired

Some possible alternatives in no particular order (this list may grow)

AdaFruit.IO – The internet of things for everyone

Microsoft IoT Central – Enterprise-grade IoT SaaS

ThingSpeak – The open IoT platform with MATLAB analytics

Blynk – Democratizing the Internet of Things

Cayenne – Simplify the Connected World

Thinger.io platform

SenseIoT – Internet of Things Data Hosting Platform

Temboo – Tools for Digital Transformation

Carriots by Altair

Nearbus – An IoT Open Project

ubidots – An application Builder for the Internet of Things

Microsoft IoT Central – Enterprise Grade IoT SaaS

Kii Cloud

Artik – End-to-end IoT Platform

goplusplatform – Connect your things with GO+

I’m initially looking for a platform which is the “least painful” transition from Xively.

nRF24L01 Raspberry PI Gateway Hardware

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For those who came to my MS Ignite AU Intelligent Cloud booth session

Building Wireless Field Gateways

Connecting wireless sensor nodes to the cloud is not the mission it used to be, because the Azure team (and many OS projects) have developed tooling which can help hobbyist and professional developers build solutions. How could you build a home scale robust, reliable and secure solution with off the shelf kit without blowing the budget?

Sparkfun nRF24L01 module &Adafruit perma proto hat

NRF24L01 Raspberry PI DIY Gateway Hardware

BoM (all prices as at Feb 2016)

You will also need some short lengths of wire and a soldering iron.

For those who want an “off the shelf” solution (still requires a minor modification for interrupt support) I have used the Raspberry Pi to NRF24l01+ Shield USD9.90

2015-09-25t072754-447z-20150925_091942-855x570_q85_pad_rcrop

Instructions for modifications and software to follow.

NetMF MP3 Player Part 2

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Building on the file listing code from the previous post in the next class we wrote the simplest possible NetMF code to play all of MP3 files on an SD Card. The Mp3 player shields I have all use a Vs1053B chip to decode the MP3 byte stream. This sample uses the driver code from softelectrotech.

public static void Main()
{
   Vs1053B player = new Vs1053B(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D2, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D6, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D7, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D8);
   string[] MusicFiles = Directory.GetFiles(@"\SD");
   player.SetVolume(180, 180);

   // Print a list of all the files on the SD card.
   foreach (string file in MusicFiles)
   {
      Debug.Print(file);
   }

   foreach (string file in MusicFiles)
   {
      Debug.Print("Play start " + file);

      player.Play(file, true);

      Debug.Print("Play finish " + file);
   }
}

Some of the students observed the order of the files was not what they were expecting. The order of the files appeared to depend on how they were copied to the memory card.

\SD\05 Sunday Bloody Sunday.mp3
\SD\06 Bad.mp3
\SD\07 Where the Streets Have No Name.mp3
\SD\08 I Will Follow.mp3
\SD\09 The Unforgettable Fire.mp3
\SD\10 Sweetest Thing [The Single Mix].mp3
\SD\11 Desire.mp3
\SD\12 When Love Comes to Town.mp3
\SD\13 Angel of Harlem.mp3
\SD\14 All I Want Is You.mp3
\SD\01 Pride (In the Name of Love).mp3
\SD\02 New Year's Day.mp3
\SD\03 With or Without You.mp3
\SD\04 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.mp3
Playback
Play start \SD\05 Sunday Bloody Sunday.mp3
Play finish \SD\05 Sunday Bloody Sunday.mp3
Play start \SD\06 Bad.mp3

All of the students observed that the tacks were being played synchronously which didn’t allow you to change the volume or interrupt the playback to pause the current track or change the track being played.

The next steps were to ensure the music files were sorted into a consistent order and that playback was not synchronous.

MusicPlayerSyncBasic code

Freaduino MP3 Music Shield

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For code club one of the projects I had been considering was an MP3 player with a simple user interface (UI) based on a joystick providing track next/previous , volume up/down, and pause/play. I looked for suitable Arduino shields which had Netduino driver support. I narrowed the list down to (Prices as at April 2014) these VS1053 based shields

For Code Club I purchased 5 of the Elecfreaks Freaduino shields as the price and on-board joystick made it ideal for our application. The Freaduino MP3 Shield wiki page indicated that the following pins were used by the SPI bus

D10 – Used for SPI Chip Select.
D11 – Used for SPI MOSI.
D12 – Used for SPI MISO.
D13 – Used for SPI SCK.

I initially tried the NetduinoVS1053 library from SoftElectoTech but found that no sound was produced. I tried different pin configurations, format and bitrate music files but nothing worked. I then had a look at the shield schematic and noticed that D11/D12/D13 were not connected to the VS1053, only D10 which is used for chip selected on the MicroSD card socket was connected.

I soldered some jumpers to the board and connected the SPI pins on the ICSP socket to the D11,D12 & D13 on the edge connector and the shield now works. It would be good if elecfreaks could make the pins the SPI bus uses configurable using jumpers or similar.

Modified Freaduino Music Shield

Modified Freaduino Music Shield

The library needs to be initialised with the following pins

Player = newVs1053B(Pins.GPIO_PIN_A1, Pins.GPIO_PIN_A3, Pins.GPIO_PIN_A2, Pins.GPIO_PIN_A0);

The joystick operations can be handled with Interrupts with the following configuration

InterruptPort volumeDownButton = newInterruptPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D7, false, Port.ResistorMode.PullUp, Port.InterruptMode.InterruptEdgeLow);

InterruptPort volumeUpButton = newInterruptPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D3, false, Port.ResistorMode.PullUp, Port.InterruptMode.InterruptEdgeLow);

InterruptPort nextSongButton = newInterruptPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D4, false, Port.ResistorMode.PullUp, Port.InterruptMode.InterruptEdgeLow);

InterruptPort previousSongButton = newInterruptPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D6, false, Port.ResistorMode.PullUp, Port.InterruptMode.InterruptEdgeLow);

InterruptPort playStopButton = newInterruptPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D5, false, Port.ResistorMode.PullUp, Port.InterruptMode.InterruptEdgeLow);

volumeUpButton.OnInterrupt += new NativeEventHandler(volumeUpButton_OnInterrupt);

volumeDownButton.OnInterrupt += new NativeEventHandler(volumeDownButton_OnInterrupt);

nextSongButton.OnInterrupt += new NativeEventHandler(nextSongButton_OnInterrupt);

previousSongButton.OnInterrupt += new NativeEventHandler(previousSongButton_OnInterrupt);

playStopButton.OnInterrupt += new NativeEventHandler(playStopButton_OnInterrupt);

I could now play MP3 files off the SD card on my Netduino Plus 2 but couldn’t adjust the volume or change the track being played. Using an interrupt based approached for the UI also highlighted some problems with the driver code which I will discuss in a future post.