BLE, RTE, Raspberry Pi & More
https://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-DYI-Electronics-Meetup/
It was a great experience to meet 2 of the members of the Bangalore DYI meetup group. As always it is inspiring when you meet motivated people who are either amateur and professional who share your passion. This was the second successful meetup of the group after a month long gap and we discussed many topics starting from introduction of members. We had Utkarsh who had travelled a long distance for the meetup and wanted to explore the area of IOT and Machine Learning and based on my understanding of the subject tried answering some of his points.
Also there was Senthil who is a seasoned professional in the IOT space and a great inspiration with whom I continued the discussion on BLE, RTC (Real time Clock) modules and also discussed Rasberry Pi and GPS & GSM modules that are currently in market.
To start out I explored a e.g (https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/cc2541-iBeacons-ibeacon-Bluetooth-4-0_1779628456.html). There is a great app BLE Scanner available on the Android Play store that can be used to work with various BLE modules (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macdom.ble.blescanner&hl=en).
I also suggest you to read more on the below links for BLE technology:
Apart from this we also discussed on real time clock modules, this came out from our discussion that Raspberry PI internally doesn’t have an internal clock and either depends on network timing or an external RTC module and the challenges surrounding it.A sample RTC device is DS3231 module.
We also discussed on some good GSM boards which are reliable and can also be used for DYI and professional purposes.The QUECTEL board seems to be a more reliable board for industrial and IOT applications as well.
The above SIM300 is one of the cost effective board which provide both GSM and GPS facilities in single module. Though I have to explore both the boards to provide my view but see them promising.
And finally we have some exciting plans for the future. For the next meetup I plan to focus on Servo/DC motors, how can we use it for Robotics and also do a demo on a sample IOT usecase. I also welcome new ideas and demos of IOT or DYI applications that can be showcased in the group or in the Blog.
