M10CUBE

15/07/2020

On m10-sensor developing...

Realized that some sensors must be on separate boards some time a distance apart. For instance:

- Temperature, Humidity, Barometric must be in a light protective case (being in shadow)

- Ambient Light, UV must be in direct light position.

- Fine Dust, Particle sensor must have its own ventilated case

- Acceleration sensor

- Motion sensor

- And so on...

The idea is to design ONLY ONE PCB sensor.  Then this board according to the populated components will have different sensor capabilities.

For this to be achieved some kind of bus communication must be established. RS485 was chosen at the moment because it is cheap, ready available and easy to design. Boards can me daisy chained.

Main components except the various sensors must have:

- ESP8266

- SD card

- Buzzer

- RS485 communication

At the moment a sensor board following the above specs is under development (see image below)

As an option to be investigated is to have footprints for:

- LoRa 

- GPS

For those may be an STM32 footprint to be a necessity but not before the embedded Wemos D1 has not the ability to handle all the above functions. It is only a matter of # of pin-outs needed.

18/06/2020

At this point the module will measure environmental values:
- Temperature, Barometric  pressure, Humidity
- VOCs
- Ambient light and UV light
- Fine Dust PM2.5, PM10
- Sound level
- Acceleration
- NO2, O3, CO2
- Wind Speed and Direction
- Rain
For a few days now a deep search is going on to finalize the m10-sensor (environmental) board. That may take more time than originally planed.
Better R&D will make this board very useful.
- Decisions mast taken for ready sensor modules to place on PCB or individual sensor modules chips.
- Connection types and wiring for the sensors locating outside the main PCB at least meter away (UART for fine dust sensor, Analog high quality sensors, I2C sensors,  2 wire sensors)
Taking account the work done by established companies in the environmental sensing IOT. Among them:
- Adafruit, Grove, Sparkfun, Bosch, Omron, Renesas, ST, Winsen, ScioSense

Some serious projects are taken into account:
- Hackair. EU funded program "Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation". https://www.hackair.eu
- iSCAPE. EU funded program "Horizon 2020". https://www.iscapeproject.eu
- Smartcitizen. Citizen Science Revolution. Fab Lab Barcelona. https://smartcitizen.me
- Luftdaten. https://sensor.community/en
- Sensor community. https://sensor.community/en
- Sensebox. https://sensebox.de
- uRADMonitor. https://www.uradmonitor.com

The above list does not contain what is on planet but it is a starting point. These projects are very professional.
The idea is to build a first version that meets most of our current expectations  and then we see what comes next.
That is to build a solid "brick" on the M10CUBE concept.

20/05/2020

On going is an STM32 M10CUBE add-on module. The board is planned to accommodate:

- NUCLEO-F303K8 module. Interchangeable with Arduino nano.
- Super-capacitor for STM32 RTC.
- Micro SD
- CAN transceiver chip MCP2551 or TJA1040
- Analog I/O 10V
- ESP8266 ESP-01 module.
- Micro SD (common for STM32 or ESP8266. Jumper select)
- LoRa E22-900M22S + E22-900M30S module
- GPS NEO-7M

Design: KiCAD.

Time: About a month.

If you have  have knowledge in electronic design and like to contribute on that, please let me know to be part of the team in slack. So to shorten the PCB design time.

Next a M10CUBE sensor board is planned.