Make a device that tells you when something goes wrong with your work

You are so right! And commiserations on your loss (of audio) :(

This reminds me of working on machines. When I bash my knuckles, I do not get mad at the machine, because I am the idiot, not the machine. I also don't get mad because the lessons that are hard won are never forgotten. Your hand/wrench only has to slip once for you to remember to work smarter. You only have to lose audio once to remember to check your audio from now on ;)

You are in luck with only 2AAA batteries you are able to measure your BPM for for over 2 months. 😁

Consider it a substitute for your weekly cardio😄

Thank you!

I saw the differences between v1 and v2 too but did not understand. I hope somebody will create a boards Definition file for the Adafruit core. It should not be too complicated for somebody with knowledge…

You are welcome!

I just saw your super Thanks on my PC (it is not displayed on the IPad). Thank you for your support!

Code written on nRF studio or arduino?

@@elangovanhariprashanth4087 I used nRF Studio with the Zephyr RTOS.

I am sure this is possible. I would love if somebody would transfer this knowledge to a Arduino library…

I had it on my list for a long time. Now the status seemed to be "usable". We will see where this goes and if ESPRESSIF will get better in power consumption with their Zigbee chips.

You are welcome!

Thank you very much!

Oh actually, the seeed xiao ble core uses the 7.xx softdevice and version 1.0.0 of the core includes the bluefruit library and examples

Good information. Thank you! Maybe we will get more attention after this video…

I think licensing for the ANT+ stack will always be a problem for makers wanting to use ANT+. I don't foresee any support for Arduino for this because of that.

I never used ANT+ :-(

Exactly... I agree with all points... Same experience I have.

best comment ever. People think Arduino Core is the key to everything, but no. Also, nRF52 has Bluetooth Stack implemented in hardware while ESP32 implements Bluetooth Stack in software as I understand. So for Wifi ESP32 it may be better but for BLE nRF52 it is much better. In the future, Nordic will also release a SoC with Wifi stack implemented in hardware, as it has just purchased a wifi IP core start-up and is working on creating new SoCs for low-power applications with wifi and ble.

Thx for the information. Sadly this sound like Nordics Products do not really suit the Arduino approach. I personally favor a clean and uniform approach over a very hardware specific. I want to Abstract from the actual hardware quick and cleanly. Arduino works very well with that approach. You get to you goal quite fast or close enough to customize the last 10% The Nordic approve sounds like very hard work before anything works and than it gets easier. But that's very expensive.

I agree that it should be possible to create an Arduino simplification. We do not want every feature, just the standard cases. If I would have to learn a new environment for each chip I have no time to build something… This would also help the professional market where time is money an learning curves are investments.

@@Gabriel965519437 None of it is implemented in hardware -- it's all in the blob of firmware that they call their SoftDevice, which you're not strictly forced to use if you can do better.

That was my intention…

You are welcome!

I was not aware that this chip has Bluetooth.

You are welcome!

Cool project!

You probably need to bypass the regulator: "Input voltage (VIN): 5V", "Circuit operating voltage: 3.3V" and/or disable (or more likely remove) the other unused (lipo charger, IMU, mic, etc) components.

I agree that the other components consume some energy. Maybe I will compare a standard board.

Let’s hope we will get some improvements…

You are welcome!

Maybe we get some additional help to reduce power…

Yes, the ESP32 is very cheap!

Have you tried to program and use the peripherals on the ESP32 (e.g., the ESP32S2)? It's hideous. They're all screwed up. The ADC is not useful for anything beyond a potentiometer input, and even for that, it needs a translation table to linearize the values. That chip is a joke. Contrast that with the Atmel SAMD51 or the nrf52840. They presumably use peripherals from the ARM library. They work beautifully -- even the ADC is useful for many purposes, and in fact, it's offset/linearity/etc. can be tweaked through registers. It's a thing of beauty. The ESP32 chips are fine for calculators, but nothing with non-trivial I/O.

Well it is a bit unfair to judge ESP32 like that. There are many parameters to discuss. Assume that ESP32 is just like what you have said, it would be impossible to go that popular in the market, where there are real products run on ESP32. You can give ESP32 a try using its native SDK. It has improved a lot

@@usefulelectronics, you may not be replying to my comment, but I'll reply to yours. The core and peripherals on the Nordic chip work the same they do on other Cortex M4 chips, for which there is very good documentation. Perhaps Nordic could provide better documentation on the Bluetooth section of the nrf52840. (By the way, Raspberry provides even better documentation for the RP2040, with it's dual-core M0+; they are also very up-front about with its errata.) I don't have personal experience with the RP2040, but I have a fair amount of experience with the ATSAMD51, the nrf52840, and the ESP32S2. Except for Bluetooth, the first two of those chips operate identically, plus or minus clock speed. The ESP32, on the other hand, has a fine core (with less flexibility than the ARM chips, and with very poor documentation, as I said), and with very poor peripherals that are full of show-stopping defects. If the ESP32S2's core were sold as a microprocessor, that would be fine. The products that use the chip are likely using the "SoC" in a simple way, driven by cost considerations. Once you finally get it to do what you want, it's not hard to crank out a lot of that product. I would not, however, use that chip in any critical application. There must be better choices among RISC-V-core chips. So far, though I don't have insight into the internal machinery and registers of the nrf52840's Bluetooth section, it's worked well and reliably for me. Nordic is a serious company, unlike Espressive and the IP chain that underlies that RISC-V parts. For toys, it's not a big issue.

Late for the video, but for sure not late for you! That is the advantage of UKposts!

Good point. So far I never used the C3 in a project.

There is also official LOLIN Store on Aliexpress with another tiny esp32c3 board variant "C3 PICO V1.0.0" 25.4x25.4mm (which is larger than TTGO T-01C3, but seems more usable for different cases). And Seeed XIAO module on esp32c3 chip is also available.

Interesting! Thank you.

You are welcome!

I agree that we come closer to „no battery“ boards like the Enocean.

You are welcome!

Good point if you want to stick with BLE. For temperature and humidity Another possibility Is Zigbee sensors. They do not need reflashing…

@@AndreasSpiess I tried the Xiaomi Zigbee thermometers at the location I need it, but the connection was unreliable. Additionally, the BLE variant has a screen where you can read the temperature directly.

I never heard of this second XTAL :-(

@@AndreasSpiess I think it's the 32Khz RTC xtal. I guess that allows the RTC to keep the radio active at the right intervals somehow?

Nrf also use optional 2nd xtal for rtc.

Sounds like an interesting project! Concerning micro-Python. I tried two times to present higher languages for microcontrollers and the feedback was not favorable. So I will wait for a few years till my next try ;-)

Nice project! Pay attention with coin cells. They cannot provide a lot of current. So maybe you need capacitors to buffer the power peaks of the BLE transmitter. They are short, but high (compared with the microamperes in normal operation)

Thanks for your answer. If I go down to the coin cell level, I will take a look at your tip.

:-)

And definitively more skilled and with more time than me ;-)

Always interesting to see other people using these chips. I started getting into Segger embedded studio to program them and have got rather out of my depth. Partly because I'm determined to use ANT+. One day maybe it will make sence and the benefit is the Arduino IDE now looks simple.

The ecosystem is the most important advantage of the Arduino IDE…

Maybe I will have a look at Zephyr once…

I use the power profiler kit 2

I do not know if there is a range difference between BLE and Bluetooth. 30m seems to be a lot with the onboard antennas.

You are welcome!

No, I did not do such a video.

De rien!

Excellent video, thank you. My understanding from the datasheet of the U-blox Nina W102 is that it also uses an esp32 chip. Is that correct Jedi Spiess? I have been playing with the nano rp2040 connect recently and I very much like it apart from the flimsy wifi antenna. My first one broke off by accident from a 1 meter drop. I noticed the second one I got from arduino now has a blob of hot glue or epoxy resin holding the antenna in place as additional strength. They are not cheap but I have had great success using it in my weather station. I was going to use an ESP32 but my simple brain could not get all the hardware to play nice. Lucky for me, old Philhower III saved my butt. Thx again Earle. His board manager made my project possible.

Yes, the Nina W102 uses an ESP32.

Three years ago I made a video about Microphython and the comments were not very favorable. Maybe it’s time will come later…

You can reduce the power with a command. And for sure, this also would reduce power consumption. I did not try it.

@@AndreasSpiess can it “tell” when it gets interrogated? Maybe have it go into a less frequent broadcast mode when it doesn’t have anyone using it. Then, if it does start getting used, you could have it “wake up” and broadcast more. Like if it was a beacon at an art show, it’d be more active when tours were coming through.

:-)

I did no more use the ESP32 for BLE other than a gateway connected to mains.

This is an old video. So maybe things changed by now.

Most people are doing little projects like you seem to be asking for, so there are plenty of other channels out there for that already. This channel is intended for non-beginners and this is why it's attractive to that audience. If you want a beginner's channel, then I'd suggest Adafruit's channel for you, or just go to Instructables where people do the projects you seem to be looking for. Regards.

​@@ericbwertz Huh? What? I'm not sure what your background is, but from my perspective, this channel seems to be targeted at beginners who have little or no experience whatsoever with micro-controllers. Don't get me wrong: Andreas does a great job. But there's nothing on this channel that I've ever seen which I would consider to even be intermediate level, let alone advanced. Adafruit's channel is unwatchable to me. To me, their channel is essentially, "Electronics for Children Aged 8 to 12." I'm trying to prod Andreas to focus on simple projects because, then, perhaps, he might eventually create some intermediate and advanced projects. "Oh look, I received a notification that the postman delivered the mail!" To me that's a simple beginner project. It seems suitable for high school students taking a class entitled, "Introduction to Micro-Controllers."

@@yekutielbenheshel354 I don't really agree about who you think that the audience is here, but do about Adafruit's content generally. The only exceptions there are Scott's Friday live coding show and some of the guest projects on Show and Tell. Otherwise they mostly do seem assume (or pretend, or want) that most of their audience are early/mid-teenagers. I haven't seen any inclination that Andreas wants to do projects here. He seems to enjoy doing product evaluations and comparison, and focused technology demonstrations and explorations. By the way, you may want to check out Great Scott's channel. I haven't been there for years, but Hackaday used to have a lot of pointers to interesting projects that people were working on, so you may want to look there also. Regards.

@@ericbwertz I suppose some people think Andreas’ videos on this channel are aimed at advanced beginners or perhaps even low intermediate students. That’s fine. Everyone has their own perspective. From my perspective, Andreas’ videos on this channel are aimed at novices. That is not a veiled criticism; that’s merely my opinion. Generally I dislike Great Scott's channel. Although I think Great Scott really is great, his channel content rarely interests me. Once in a while I come across an article which I find valuable on Hackaday, but mostly I find it to be a waste of my time. The whole premise of Hackaday leaves me cold because I almost invariably refuse to waste my time on obsolete, “retro tech.” From my vantage point, trying to revive some obsolete piece of technology that guys used to play with when they were kids is foolish. Put obsolete tech in a museum, or a recycling center, or a landfill. But keep it far away from me. I agree with your sentiment that Andreas doesn't seem to want to work on complex projects on this channel. In and of themselves, his toy projects themselves are mostly worthless to me. Don't get me wrong: Andreas does a great job. I assume some high schools and universities actually use his videos in their introduction to microelectronics classes. Of course, for toy projects C/C++ is fine because C/C++ is often easy to use for toy projects. But for more complex projects (such as many commercial projects) developing with C/C++ code is often (but of course not always) unnecessarily time-consuming and tedious. It’s well-known that languages like MicroPython and TinyGo have the potential to dramatically lower the cost of producing many IoT products. When, for example, the performance benefits of C/C++ aren’t needed, MicroPython or TinyGo are often better choices for building many IoT products. Sure, they are immature, incomplete languages. I know that. Furthermore, languages such as MicroPython and TinyGo also tend to enable “regular” software engineers (not only “embedded engineers”) to more easily develop software for embedded devices without having to delve too deeply into the world of embedded engineering generally, nor C/C++ in particular. Andreas' product evaluations and comparisons are valuable to me. His methodical and redundant "Swiss approach" lends itself very nicely to evaluating and reviewing products. On this channel, Andreas is great at what he does. But I wish he’d do, something like, for example, a 30 part series on an automated solution for retrieving his mail, which his “Postman who doesn’t ring twice” (Jack Nicholson’s real-life persona disgusts me) has delivered, and which then slices a slit in each envelope, and finally places each slitted yet unopened envelope on a table. IoT has a bad reputation for a good reason: too many people spend too much time promoting their toy projects including, by the way, manufacturers. (I’m looking at you Samsung! Stop putting ridiculous IoT features into, say, dishwashers and refrigerators in order to jack up the prices and reap greater profits). Toy projects are relatively easy. Sure, toy projects are often excellent learning tools. But most real projects sold to real customers require engineers to resolve many vexing problems, which usually don’t show up in toy projects. When he bothers to actually do a toy project, to me, it’s as if Andreas metaphorically demonstrates how to build a dog house. That’s nice, but not enough for me. See, “I want more!” (Where have I heard that before? Has some guy with a Swiss accent harped on that point for years?/s sarcasm). Metaphorically, instead of building dog houses, eventually I want to see Andreas build, say, a kitchen or a bathroom. In other words, I want him to build more complex projects which utilize microelectronics. Will he do that? I doubt it. But, I hope he does. Andreas is an excellent teacher. Of course toy engineering is a great way to get started. But I despise the popular approach in most university engineering curricula that focuses far too much on theory and far too little on practice. Real world engineering projects are often remarkably complex and vexing. The best way to learn how to build them, is, of course, to build them. Frankly, I am contemptuous of university engineering departments that award diplomas to students who haven’t actually built real (and useful) projects for real people to use in the real world. Theory is crucial. But it’s merely a foundation for actual practice. Trying to deal with so-called engineers, who cannot solve relatively simple problems, has been a vexing problem I’ve encountered so often, that I have become habituated implicitly assume that any engineer whom I have begun to work for the first time with is “incompetent until proven otherwise.” The world is full of university students who are studying engineering. But because their education is based primarily on theory and simple toy projects, most of them don’t learn how to be good engineers. I find this sad state of affairs extremely disheartening. If you want someone to learn how to build houses, at some point, you should have them actually build houses… as part of their formal education. Teaching with toy projects is a great start. But it’s not enough. “I want more!”

I do not know. Maybe the datasheet knows?

Low latency on the receiver always means high power consumption because the receiver has to be always on. I suggest the simplest protocol you can find for your application like 433 MHz. But keep in mind that it will not work if two buttons are pressed the same time.

Zephyr is on my list. We will see…

Mostly, I use Nordic's Power Profiler II because it is small and convenient.

Good info. Thanks!

:-)

Good to know. Thanks.

I never heard of the Arduino Primo :-(

@@AndreasSpiess Primo was a board that was made in about 2017 and discontinued sometime on 2018. It was interesting becasue it came as a package of 2 boards: main one with Uno form factor and a tiny one (like Adafruit lillypad) that you flashed by connecting to tghe main board. Great board, but Nordic chips work best in their own environment.

This is probably why I still stick to the Arduino IDE…

I never worked with the NRF ADC, so I do not know.

This is a good idea! RFID indeed consumes a lot of energy.

Both are valid proposals.

Maybe. Not decided yet…

No.

These days most things are a bit pricey if compared with two years ago. One exception is Espressif. I do not know how they do it!

You are welcome!

I just saw your Super Thanks on my PC (it is not displayed on the IPad). Thank you for your support!

Gern geschehen!

Ich habe gerade dein Super Thanks auf dem PC gesehen. Auf dem iPad wurde er nicht angezeigt). Danke!

Your summary and "conclusions" lead me to consider using the "coin-cell beacon" as a stand-alone, local slave, which serves NRF52840 timed interrupts. .. So, the NRF board need only "wake itself up" and "ask" the coin-cell beacon for the most recent sensor value .. Maybe, the NRF update interval could be increased until the entire "system" could run for one year, on minimum battery resources. (Yes, "an expedient hack" but, for a tired,. old engineer, who values time over money, such an expedient kludge could be a *good thing!).

Maybe somebody will create a small low power library with examples…

So far I had no usage for ANT+ …

I assume the code uses some sleep mode in the background. But I do not have more info :-(

@@AndreasSpiess Ah, I was referring to your "no sleep function is used" ( 9:22 ) and wasn't sure whether it was accessible, usable, switched off or on etc. There is also an InPlay NanoBeacon (supposedly lowest power, no coding required), though I don't know how good these are.

Maybe this will work. Somebody has to try it.

and for high volume products as well.

I agree.

Unfortunately, I never used BLE on a desktop :-(

Astonishing! Usually this is the result of good hardware and good software…

Which board did you use?

Happy to know that, you could reach the 25uA average current. Can you please share details about the board and a code

Thanks for the clarification!

This seems something completely different to what I showed in the video.

The problem with the ESP32 is it’s long on-time. Much much longer than the signal length. The signal power is comparable, I agree

@@AndreasSpiess There are some tricks to get a transmit and power up spike which can be as short as 100ms. One which you probably know about is the static IP mode, but there are others as well. Take a look at this. Someone has rewritten the wifi libraries for speed. ukposts.info/have/v-deo/gWOdfo2aiYmdtnU.html

I thought I talked about BLE in this video and not WiFi…

Thanks!

It should work now. Sorry!

It is also on my list…

You can change pinnumbers using a text editor. But I am not sure if this is needed.

OpenOCD is a very special topic and nothing for a mainstream channel like mine :-(

You are right, you always get most out of a chip if you use the proprietary IDE. However, we want to be able to use the same IDE for different chips (Atmel, Espressif, STM). That is why I use the Arduino IDE on this channel.

@@AndreasSpiess I believe you mean SDK as the IDE is usually independent of the processor. The Nordic SDK is really about managing the Bluetooth peripheral and represents the minimum allocation of resources to do that and still maintain efficiency and flexibility. Without it all you have is an ARM, with it, you have most of the bare metal functionality of the ARM plus Bluetooth, which is kind of the point. A similar nRF52-based board was recently released by XIAO and it has support in the Arduino system with and without mbed. Same IDE, same programming model, but with a ton hidden from the developer. This is fine if you are not making any serious demands on the board. YMMV.

It's not been resolved, but also this vulnerability happened like 3 - 4 years ago. It's just that it only really got notable when people used that well documented vulnerability to get apple's firmware out of the nrf52832 they used. There are a lot of microcontrollers on the market with similar vulnerabilities and nobody does anything because it's a difficult (though now automated) physical attack and only if you're selling millions of units will you likely be targeted.

Thank you for the information!

:-)

I am a UKpostsr and no consultant. So it is not possible. But you get ready-made amplifier boards with bluetooth on AliExpress. That helps a lot, I think.

Good info. Maybe somebody will add a small low power library or change the examples to use these particular modes…

:-)

So far I have no such plans.

@@AndreasSpiess It would be nice to see it since its very popular for DIYs

:-)

True for v2.x (and it's crap), but v1.0.0 of the core is a fork of the adafruit nrf52 core but with a newer softdevice. I'm testing it at the moment and it seems to work quite well...

@@insanitywolf05 i hate the fakt that they don't work together for a single Arduino core for every Architektur. The changes Seeed does to the official core are so small. They could have just asked for an inclusion in the official core. This means double the debuggingy support and features arriving late. Therefore the XIAO BLE went right into the unsed microcontroller Box. I habe enough old sparkfun and seed boards that are not supposed anymore and discontinued

It should be a breeze to adapt the Adafruit nrf52 Bootloader to the xiao ble by just changing the led and button pins and recompiling. But I agree, nrf52 for Arduino is messy patchwork, but I like to hack around with it anyway. Let's face it: the 80mA the ESP32s pull have nothing to do with the Idea of BLE.

@@insanitywolf05 hm. Maybe yes but you would have to maintain the fork for future updates and all. I'm only using Platform IO. They have there own version of the Arduino cores. There it might be simpler but still, why not combine all Boards of an architectur. About the BLE power consumption, that's something I didn't look into up to this point. I'm using BLE to connect to a smartphone while running continuously with multiple sensors. Here the energy usage is neglectable. Would be another story for ultra low power applications. Buts the ESP32 in general is not for ULP. It's more for constantly running IoT and sensor applications that have high performance requirements

@@savejeff15 The only company that does a decent job in this space is Adafruit, I have to say. You do get more and cheaper choices from Seeed, but they've always been a challenge to get anything resembling decent support from, except hardware replacement.

I agree that commercial BLE/Zigbee Devices are very cheap.

I need some help you have telegram?

So far I did not see a lot of Thread projects. Do you have examples?

@@AndreasSpiess Well, I have temperature/humidity sensors based on nRF52840 and Thread, just a hobby project. I can share firmware with you if you want. From the commercial side, if I remember correctly, Google Nest is Thread based.

@@dmitrysysoletin9967 Maybe you send me a message on Twitter or Facebook Messenger?

Both mixed

Scan mode is receive mode and it's very power hungry, drawing about 12mA

@@insanitywolf05 is there a way to have a receiver constantly listening in ultra low power ?

That's what BLE aims at by defining connection intervals (as far as I understand correctly) where data is exchanged so the rx does not have to be on all the time.

Now it should work. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Maybe they see it differently:-(

I wonder the same. I think they use the model of selling cheaper but at a bigger volume to make up for the price. Adafruit has also grown quite a lot since their competition days with Sparkfun. It’s one of the largest small scale electronics manufacturer in the USA.

That ESP32 module is almost certainly the one straight from Espressif that they've marked-up because some people don't want to get them straight from DigiKey for less. I wouldn't say that they've been making things cheaper, but they have consistently made stuff at a decent price (especially as a US company). Some prices DO go up though. Their STM32 Feather went from $25 to $40 6-12 months ago. All in all they do a good job of running the company though in most respects.

A major problem of Adafruit is the global distribution cost. For the US they are a good solution. For Europe shipping adds a lot of cost…

@@AndreasSpiess I believe it. Does Digikey distribute in Switzerland? I know Adafruit sells on there as well.

@@McTroyd I can order from Digikey. But there is a minimum of 60 dollars if I remember right.

No problem. I am also late…

That is what I thought. So we still have a lot of improvement…

I do not understand your question :-(

@@AndreasSpiess My question was.. Which of these micro devices is the smallest in size?

@@ivuvu4065 Probably the XIAO

It works fine!