Using TLS to POST from ESP-32 to a Cloudflare service

Arduino HTTPClient Failure I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried this, but I just spent the better part of a week trying to debug this little problem, so I thought maybe I’d save someone some time. I was trying to use WiFiClientSecure along with HTTPClient to POST to an authentication server that is fronted by cloudflare. No matter what I did, I got error messages. I was sending a JSON payload, and it kept telling me that the parameters weren’t in the JSON.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

April 8, 2022 Read
Connecting The Things Network to InfluxDB

There are many ways to connect your sensors to the network in the IoT. For short-range connections, there is Bluetooth LE, or Zigbee, or 802.15.4, or ZWave. For longer distances (though still fairly short) there’s always WiFi. But when you need longer distances, sometimes very long distances, there’s LoRaWAN. It’s a sub-gigahertz set of frequencies that are available for small bits of data. These are typically only a few bytes of data but can be sent over much longer distances — up to 2 km or more in some instances!

Reading Time: 11 minutes

March 10, 2019 Read
Programming the ARTIK-0 IoT Devices

If you’ve read this blog much at all you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a fairly big fan of the ARTIK line of IoT boards (see here, here, here, here, here, here , here and here) but I really need to clarify that a bit now. I love my ARTIK-520 board. It runs the entire InfluxData stack nicely and is a solid, reliable place to deploy IoT-Edge software. I really like it.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

July 1, 2018 Read
Here's Why I'm giving up on MyNewt (for now)

With all these sensors and platforms lying around, I wanted to just pick one and build a quick sensor demo. It should be easy, right? The basic idea As you may (or may not) know, I spent a lot of time with the Apache MyNewt project a year or so ago. It has enormous potential. It’s small, fast, and very lightweight. I even wrote a tutorial on developing an app with MyNewt.

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April 4, 2018 Read
ARTIK-520 as a Droplit.io Edge Device

Doing some further work with my trusty ARTIK-520 (hey, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail! Back up off me! ) I decided to try installing another IoT Gateway framework on it. (I’ve done that before.) Equal opportunity and all that. And I’ll be doing more of them as soon as I get more mini-SD Cards in-house. But I digress. I originally just followed the basic install instructions for deploying a Droplit.

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March 28, 2017 Read
Building an App with Apache MyNewt

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few months working on the Apache MyNewt IoT OS. If you don’t know what that is, then you really should! It’s a fairly new Apache Project, still in the ‘incubating’ phase, but they’re about to release their second beta of the 1.0 release (I think all the votes are in to approve it). Yes, there are some things still missing, and some rough edges, but it’s coming together nicely and if you’re looking for an Open Source IoT OS for your device, MyNewt may just what you’re looking for.

Reading Time: 18 minutes

February 9, 2017 Read
Mynewt iOS And Mac Apps

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Mynewt OS Project over at the Apache Software Foundation. It’s still ‘incubating’ so it’s not a full-fledged Apache project yet, but we’re making huge progress and it’s coming along nicely. In fact, we’re just releasing our first beta versions of the 1.0 release! If you’re an IoT hacker, and are looking for a small, fast, highly configurable (and open source!) RTOS, MyNewt it the ticket!

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December 16, 2016 Read