MORE ABOUT Arduino

A Wide Area Network connects far remoted devices to the Internet through gateways. LoRa is such a subscription-free communication standard, supported by many companies. There is no overlap between LoRa and WiFi or Bluetooth. The latter have a very short range, LoRa a very narrow bandwidth. Since it is used mostly with sensors, the traffic can be slow and mainly unidirectional. LoRa also supports peer-to-peer communication.

The first-ever Arduino board featuring an FPGA chip is called MKR Vidor 4000 where MKR is pronounced maker. Sized 25 x 75mm and with a wide variety of wireless interfaces to choose from, “MKR” is actually a family of boards aimed at developing IoT products.

The days that Arduino was equivalent to Arduino Uno are long gone. Today Arduino is a continuously expanding family of boards that follow the trends in electronics. The MKR branch of the Arduino board family is dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT) and as such tries to provide solutions for emerging standards and technologies. Two new boards in the MKR family, the MKR WiFi 1010 and MKR NB 1500, give the application designer once again more possibilities to consider.

The new kit is based around an Arduino MKR1000 board, several customised parts, and a complete set of electrical and mechanical components needed to assemble three projects: • whiteboard drawing robot: accepts a drawing it is given and (hopefully) replicates it on a whiteboard; • self-balancing motorcycle: maneuvers autonomously on various terrains and (ideally) remains upright using a flywheel for balance; • mobile rover: navigates between given reference points, moves objects with a forklift, and more.

This glowing new bargraph thermometer from Elektor Labs is based on an Arduino Nano. It offers a beautiful graphical representation of ambient temperature using a Russian IN-9 tube and an illuminated scale with various RGB-controlled colours. The temperature scale in degrees Celsius as well as Fahrenheit extends from 10 °C to 30 °C / 50 °F to 85 °F. The circuit consists of a 5-to-150 V "voltage doubler" step-up converter, an IN-9 tube driver based on a low-voltage rail-to-rail opamp, two RGB LEDs and of course the Nano.

This project lets you scroll text on a bank of eight 8 × 8 LED matrix displays. It uses a Wi-Fi module of type ESP-12F (based on the ESP8266), programmable with the Arduino development environment. Thus, from a smartphone or any other device that uses Wi-Fi, it is possible to send to an ESP8266 web server the text to display, the scrolling speed and the brightness.

This instalment: - Arduino board provides serial/USB adapter

One of the difficulties of monitoring parameters in remote locations is getting the data over to a control room over long distances and ‘overcoming’ geographical and man-made obstacles. This article shows how LoRa together with Arduino can help to work around such problems.

At the heart of this Wi-Fi controlled relay sits an ESP-12F module built on the famous ESP8266EX, flanked by a 4 MB memory. The ubiquitous Highly Integrated Wi-Fi-Capable System-on-Chip takes care of everything. If you prefer to think of the integrated web server and WiFi functionality as more than "black boxes", this project is a great way to learn about the intricacies of the communication between the main program and the webpage that provides the user interface on the remote device.

The next issue of Elektor Magazine will feature this new project that scrolls text on a pretty row of eight 8 × 8 LED matrix displays. Its ESP-12F Wi-Fi module (based on the ESP8266) is easily programmed with the Arduino IDE. So, from your mobile phone or any other Wi-Fi device, it suffices to send the text to display and the speed and brightness controls to an ESP8266 webserver.