Maker Perspective

For Beginners/ Aspiring Makers Arduino UNO is my recommendation, very straight forward and very easy to get started.

Tech Specifications

• Powerd by ATmega328P
• 14 Digital I/O Pin, which 6 provide PWM output
• 6 Analog Input Pins
• 16 MHz Clock
• 32 KB (ATmega328P) Flash Memory
• 2 KB SRAM
• 1KB EEPROM

The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by Arduino.cc. The board is equipped with sets of digital and analogue input/output pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards and other circuits.

The main thing I loved Arduino is the community and peripherals That supported, also the Shields. these are boards that can be plugged on top of the Arduino PCB extending its capabilities. The different shields follow the same philosophy as the original toolkit: they are easy to mount and cheap to produce.

Another one is the IDE, The Arduino Integrated Development Environment is a cross-platform application that is written in functions from C and C++. It is used to write and upload programs to Arduino compatible boards, but also, with the help of 3rd party cores, other vendor development boards.

The Original Arduino Uno cost around $21, but you can also get clones even cheaper, but I recommend to buy original to support there mission and vision.

Website: https://www.arduino.cc/

There are some recommendations if you're into hackathons or quick prototype/POC.

ESP32/ESP8266

Others who have experience with the Arduino ecosystem, I suggest the Esperssif ESP8266 or ESP32 Low-cost WiFi and BLE* development platform, which is highly supported by the Arduino ecosystem. That means you can reuse many of the Arduino functions and libraries out of the box.

Particle Photon

The Photon is a $19 tiny Wi-Fi IoT device for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things. It's easy to use, it's powerful, and it's connected to the cloud. The board is powered by a Cypress Wi-Fi chip alongside a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller.

It's very easy to quickstart, also super easy to connect with particle cloud if you project involve Cloud and Connectivity.

Website: https://www.particle.io/

If you need more computing and processing power you can check the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard Single Board Computers

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries Since the aim is to teach kids about physical computing and computer science, the documentation and getting started is very straight forward and simple.

There are different models of Raspberry Pi SBC(Single Board Computer) and the latest one is Raspberry Pi 4 Model B which cost starts from $35. There is also lighter version called PiZero which cost around $5

Website: https://www.raspberrypi.org/

BeagleBoard

The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind and as a way of demonstrating the Texas Instrument's OMAP3530 system-on-a-chip.

If you are a beginner and want to get started the embedded Linux development, then you need to checkout beagleboard series single-board computer.

Website: https://beagleboard.org/

The list is not over yet, I'll share more thought on the thread as a followup.

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Sharing a tip that can be very useful when working with Raspberry pi GPIO, The GPIO Pinout is designed to be both a quick and interactive reference to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins, plus a comprehensive guide to your Raspberry Pi's GPIO interfaces. It also includes dozens of pinouts for Raspberry Pi add-on boards, HATs and pHATs.

This Pinout.xyz gather useful information about the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface and add-on boards and invite board manufacturers to produce their own "overlay" files which describe which pins their Pi add-ons use. It's very handy when comes quick prototyping.

command

pinout

more details: https://pinout.xyz/

Are you Interested to Build Electronics Projects?

• Learn how to use setup raspberry pi
• Learn how to use raspberry pi GPIO
• Learn how to use the NodeRED platform
• Learn how to work with Linux command Line at a basic level

Join 2-Days Raspberry Pi Beginners Workshop on 28 and 29 August 2021.

Day 1

• Introduction to Raspberry Pi Computer
• Setting up Raspberry Pi H/W and OS
• Raspberry Pi OS Tour
• Explore Raspberry Pi Inbuilt Applications
• Introduction to Command-Line

Day 2

• Introduction to Physical Computing
• Understand GPIO and Its Functions
• Introduction to NodeRED Platform
• Write First NodeRED Application
• Manipulate GPIO and Blink LED
• Create GUI and Control LED.
• Possibilities.

Who Should Join?

• Students
• Faculties
• Hardware Technology Enthusiast
• Anyone who wants to learn new technology

What do we provide?

• 2-Days Practical Oriental Session
• Community Support
• Participation Certificate (After task completion)

When and Where

Date: 28 and 29 August 2021 Time: 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.

Here are the highlights:

• Broadcom BCM2710A1, quad-core 64-bit SoC (Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1GHz)
• 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
• 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, * Bluetooth 4.2, BLE
• 1 × USB 2.0 interface with OTG
• HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header footprint
• MicroSD card slot
• Mini HDMI port
• Composite video and reset pin solder points
• CSI-2 camera connector
• H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30); H.264 encode (1080p30)
• OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics

src: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-2/

In this blog, we are going to learn to host web pages on GitHub for free using GitHub Pages!🤩 . we will host a very simple web page like https://0xsalfar.github.io/ from scratch to complex one.

You can read the blog from here: https://blog.makergram.com/part1-host-website-on-github-for-free/

Hi @ZeeZa ,

You need to build a custom board with the ESP32 SoC and the MPU6050 IMU, right?

first, you need to select appropriate ESP32 SoC from the wide variety of model, after that using the datasheet find out the minimum configuration circuit for the SoC and add the MPU6050 module. that's all you need. the most tricky part is the minimum configuration circuit.

Fab Foundation has started a GitLab repository for the Fab Lab Network for #Covid-19 projects HERE. Please note that in order to edit the repository you need to have a fablabs.io or GitHub account. This repository includes links to many of the incredible projects and efforts being organized around the world, as well as projects of the Fab Lab Network in development. Use this as both a resource and as a central place to sync around projects, aligning with CBA, Fab Foundation and with other gurus from the fab network and beyond.

Hi @kowshik1729 ,

Yes, you can do Multi Thread in Raspberry Pi using python and note that different threads do not actually execute at the same time: they merely appear to.

We can easily implement simple threads using threading module. I'll show you some example of how actually it works.

Example :
I was trying to blink two LED's at the same time, for that I created a function that does the blink infinitely using while(True) .

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time

Rled = 12
Bled = 6

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

GPIO.setup(Rled,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Bled,GPIO.OUT)


def blue():
        while True:
                print "LED BLUE is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED BLUE is  OFF"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)
def red():
        while True:
                print "LED RED is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED RED is OFF"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)

blue()
red()

Output :

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AypMEQFpEWo&feature=youtu.be

since we are using the infinity loop for both methods, the blue() will not stop and red() will not invoke either.

In these scenarios, we can use multithread both function without waiting for another , let's try.

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
import threading



Rled = 12
Bled = 6

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

GPIO.setup(Rled,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Bled,GPIO.OUT)


def blue():
        while True:
                print "LED BLUE is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED BLUE is  OFF"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)
def red():
        while True:
                print "LED RED is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED RED is OFF"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)


t1 = threading.Thread(target=blue)
t2 = threading.Thread(target=red)


t1.start()
t2.start()

Output :

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMKYzgdNwd8&feature=youtu.be

with the help threading module we can simply run both methods at the same time (how we feel).

I think you got your answer. also, keep in mind to avoid race condition and deadlock while multithreading.

@kowshik1729 if you are more into ML take a look at the Jetson nano module, it's come with 4GB and 2GM Ram with 128-core NVIDIA Maxwell GPU and Quad-core ARM A57 CPU

more information: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano

Hi @rahuljeyaraj ,

Welcome to the MakerGram community forum, There are several capable development boards available right now for the application. I'm sharing the one we have at our MakerGram inventory,

For small models, I recommend using - XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense along with Edge Impulse platform to create the model, Here the processing is managed by the esp32 Core itself. It maybe feel slower if the mode it bit heavy.

next option for small models is Seeed Grove Vision v2 camera where all the processing will done in the inbuilt "Arm Cortex-M55 & Ethos-U55" and you can get the inference results via the I2C or UART from the board, later you can process with Arduino or any XIAO board itself.

If the model is moderate in size, better to go with Raspberry Pi and v2 or v3 camera and use the Edge Impulse models.

Currently, we have these board available.

@mahesh02 From the current Arduino ESP32 board files, we don't need to install the ESP-NN separately.

But try to choose the esp32 board version 3.1.3 and check, as I also faced issues with the latest esp32 board file.

Hi @Vishnuraj2003, I see you have A203v2 Carrier Board and it will support M.2 Key M disk 2242 as per the product page.

@Abhay Can you try one more method

Downloaded both boards, “Seeed nRF52 Boards” and “Seeed nRF52 mbed-enabled Boards.”

Copy the adafruit-nrfutil from

/Users/<user>/Library/Arduino15/packages/Seeeduino/hardware/mbed/2.9.2/tools/adafruit-nrfutil/macos/adafruit-nrfutil

to

/Users/<user>/Library/Arduino15/packages/Seeeduino/hardware/nrf52/1.1.8/tools/adafruit-nrfutil/macos/adafruit-nrfutil

Then chmod -x the copied file

Please check and let me know. Src

@Abhay said in Compilation Error for Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense in Arduino IDE on macOS:

Seeed nRF52 mbed-enabled Boards: 2.9.2
Seeed nRF52 Boards: 1.1.8

@Abhay, are you getting the error while selecting both boards? You can also try using "Seeed nRF52 Boards: 1.1.8".

Since it's nRF series can you try to install the - adafruit-nrfutil pip package and see!

also try to install - Adafruit Feather nRF52 using board manager and check again.

@Vishnuraj2003 Are you able to fix it?

Hi @PumpedMedusa, The rage is depends on the Antenna and how much TX power you have.

To choose antenna, first you need figure out - where your nodes will be, take a look at the below image. The antenna act like a "torch" if you have more dbi that mean it's focus will be increase and it can reach more distance but the angle it have it less, like a laser.

also, obstacle such as buildings, tress and mountains will affect the signal and deplete it.

So, answer for you question - What is the best LoRa module to use for long distance network? - It's really depends on where you planning to put the nodes and how high you putting the gateway. Let me know know your thoughts.

@Parves-DOMINO Did you able to solve the issue?

@Parves-DOMINO Are you still facing the issue?

Hi @Vishnuraj2003 ,

As per the documentation, I think we only route the data over the LoRa oR BT. The Wifi is used for sniffing access points for better geo-location and positioning along with GPS.

And what is the issue you facing when connecting the tracker with gateway? Double check the FREQ on both node and gateway configuration