Giveaway Week – ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit

ANAVI ESP8266 Gas Detector Display

Leon ANAVI makes from fun little boards for home automation, either ESP8266 based, or pHAT for Raspberry Pi boards. Earlier this year, I wrote about my experience getting ANAVI Gas Detector with Home Assistant. Now that’s I’m done, I’m giving away the starter kit that includes the ESP8266 board, an acrylic case, an OLED display, a USB to serial adapter, and MQ135 air quality sensor. The board is open-source hardware, meaning everything is open source from the KiCAD files to the Android sketch running on the board. It’s very easy to get started, as you can just connect a USB cable for power, and after configuring WiFi you can see the air quality  – either Poor, Moderate or Good – displayed on the OLED display, and you can easily see the data in a web dashboard after setting up Home Assistant. Everything shown in the top photo will be given […]

Dragino LHT65 is a $30 LoRaWAN Temperature & Humidity Sensor

LHT65 LoRaWAN Temperature & Humidity Sensor

If you’d like to monitor temperature and/or humidity in remote locations, one way is to get a LoRaWAN gateway, and setup a few LoRaWAN nodes connected to your own temperature & humidity sensors, and add a battery and enclosure. But if you’d like to save some time, and get a turnkey solution, Dragino LHT65 LoRaWAN temperature & humidity sensor may be an option. The sensor comes with an internal SHT20 sensor, and as well as an external DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor. Features & specifications: LoRa Connectivity Frequency Bands  – CN470, EU433, KR920, US915, EU868, AS923, AU915 LoRaWAN Class A protocol Sensors Sensirion SHT20 (internal) Temperature – Range: -40 ~ 125 °C; 0.1°C resoultion; +/-0.3°C accuracy; long term drift < 0.02 °C/yr Relative Humidity – Range: 0 to 100%; resolution: 0.04%; accuracy +/-0.3%; DS18B20 (external) – Range: -55 °C~ 125 °C; resolution: 0.0625 °C; +/-0.5°C accuracy from -10°C to +85°C; +/-2°C […]

Daytripper Uses Laser Time-of-Flight Sensor to Hide Your Slacking Off From Your Boss

Have you ever run into that awkward situation where you were actively busy doing something totally off company’s duties on the computer and got caught red-handed, or an unknown intruder ventured into your privacy, and you got in this awkward unexplained situation. If yes, then you are not alone. Work could be boring sometimes, and some of us do like to take some steam off probably by playing some video games, watch funny videos, or do something outside the blues. It is nice until a superior or a colleague catches us doing that.  One way to avoid this is by closely observing our surrounding while getting ourselves immersed but doesn’t always work well because it is super easy to slack off. Well, you don’t have to worry anymore thanks to an innovative project designed by dekuNukem called Daytripper. Daytripper is a laser tripwire that will help you automatically hide your […]

Mastak Modular Air Quality Monitor Kit Supports CO2, Dust, Formaldehyde, Ozone and other Sensor Modules

The Mastak Indoor Air Quality Monitor Kit Medium Systems Limited, a UK company has released the Mastak, SoMs designed in a mechanical range that allows for indoor air quality monitoring, with a data IoT cloud service, and communications that include NB-IoT, 5G, WiFi, BLE, and LTE-M.  The system is a new addition to the air monitoring market place. There have been reports on other air quality monitors in past articles that covered quick start and user experience with Sonoff SC WiFi, vThings WiFi CO2 Monitor, and the ANAVI Gas Detector. The Specs The ecological modules are all compatible and contain processor, peripherals and the sensors for data monitoring and collection, as well as the necessary power electronics. The modules were designed too and allow the user to arrange the systems into custom arrangements and place in unique form factors. There are a number of options also, for even further expandability […]

PT100 Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) Probes Support Extreme Temperature Ranges

WZP-187-PT100 Temperature Probe

I’ve been playing with temperature measurements in several hardware platforms such as Texas Instruments eZ430-Chronos Watch, Sonoff SC environmental monitor, Wemos D1 board with aDHT21 temperature sensor, or more recently ANAVI Thermometer with the last three platforms based on ESP8266 WiSoC. All four devices/boards above have temperature sensors designed to measure ambient temperature with for example DHT22 having a range of -40 to +125 degrees Celsius.  I had also come across DS18B20 waterproof temperature probe to measure liquid temperature several times with a range of  -55 to 125°C. Good for most use cases, and for example you could check boiling water with the later. But I had never really thought about measuring data for much lower or much higher temperatures, and this morning I came across two “PT100” temperature probes on IC Station new arrivals feed namely WZP-187 ($4.89) and an unnamed probe ($3.42) respectively capable of -200°C to +400°C […]

Getting Started with ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit and Home Assistant

ANAVI ESP8266 Gas Detector Display

ANAVI Gas Detector is an ESP8266 based board designed for MQ gas sensors supported by Arduino. This allows you to easily monitor air quality, or more accurately air conductivity using MQ-135 sensor as part of the starter kit either visually on the OLED display, or through your smartphone or computer using MQTT via automation platform such as Home Assistant. Leon Anavi sent me an ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit to have a look, and I’ll report my experience with the kit using it standalone, and through Home Assistant. Starter Kit Unboxing The kit contains the open-source hardware, ESP8266 based ANAVI Gas Detector board, a plastic stand, an OLED display, a USB to serial adapter, a gas sensor, and a few KiCad and ANAVI stickers. The board itself comes with an ESP8266MOD module, features a micro USB port for power, a reset button, four LEDs, a UART console, a 4-pin GPIO […]

Espressif Rolls out ESP32 Boards for Microsoft Azure IoT & Google Cloud IoT Core Services

ESP32 Azure IoT Kit

Espressif ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth processor is pretty versatile, and you could connect any ESP32 board to any cloud services with some efforts. But to make things even easier Espressif Systems worked with Microsoft and Google to release versions of ESP32 boards specifically designed to connect to Microsoft Azure IoT or Google Cloud IoT core. Meet ESP32-Azure IoT Kit and ESP32-DevKitC Google Cloud IoT. ESP32-Azure IoT Kit Hardware specifications: Wireless Module – ESP32-WROVER-B WiFi and Bluetooth module Storage – MicroSD card socket Display – 0.96” blue and yellow OLED display driven by SSD1306 I2C driver chip Sensors InvenSense MPU6050 motion sensor NXP MAG3110 magnetometer FBM320 barometer STMicro HTS221 humidity & temperature sensor ROHM BH1750FVI light sensor Expansion – 16-pin header Debugging – USB to UART bridge for serial debugging & programming Misc – Reset button, user button, 2x charge LED’s, 2x user LED’s, 1x passive buzzer Power Supply – 5V […]

Getting Started with Temperature & Humidity Sensors on ESP8266 using ANAVI Thermometer

ANAVI Thermometer Air / Humidity / Water

ANAVI Thermometer was launched on CrowdSupply in January.  It is an ESP8266 WiFi board with a built-in DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, support for external DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor, as well as other sensors thanks to three I2C sensors. I received the ANAVI Thermometer starter kit last month, and I’ve only found time to play with it in the last few days. I’ll start with a unboxing, assembly guide, before showing it action, and I’ll try to make it interface with Home Assistant over MQTT. ANAVI Thermometer Starter Kit Unboxing The kit comes with ANAVI Thermometer board, a plastic stand, a USB to TTL debug board, an I2C OLED display, a few nuts and bolts, and a couple of KiCad and ANAVI stickers. Leon ANAVI also added a traffic light board and LEDs, but it’s not normally part of the kit 🙂 ANAVI Thermometer board include an ESP8266 module, AM2302 […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC