IoT Cellular Communications

We’ve spent some time over the holiday period creating a new IoT training video for you on how to get started with embedded and Internet of Things cellular communications with the MQTT protocol

In this video we build upon previous videos which took us through installing an Ubuntu Virtual Machine and the Platform.io Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

We use Platform.io to check out a project which implements TinyGSM and MQTT PubSubClient for the TTGO-TCALL board which integrates an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller and a Simcom SIM800L 2G cellular modem.

We work through how the project is structured and get to a point where we can connect using the modem over a local 2G cellular network to publish and subscribe to an MQTT broker in the cloud 

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Virtual Machine 

We’ve created a refresh video for you on installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS from scratch as a Virtual Machine within VirtualBox.

This is a basic introduction enabling you to setup a standard vanilla development environment with all installed files and dependencies well controlled so that you can easily recreate projects within future tutorials

Installing Platform.io IDE

A short video taking us through how to install the excellent integrated development environment (IDE) Platform.io which we use extensively for mirocontroller firmware development. e.g. Espressif ESP32, Arduino

Yocto Project Summit 2022

Building and testing Yocto in an automated fashion with GitHub Actions and self hosted runners

Our CEO, Alex Lennon, has been speaking at the Yocto Project Summit this year on how to build and test Yocto Layers with GitHub Actions,

“I’ve been maintaining meta-mono for some years now. This is a a Yocto / OpenEmbedded layer which provides support for Mono, an “open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime”. Also, more recently, Microsoft’s dotNet is supported, “a free, cross-platform, open source developer platform for building many different types of applications. With . NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build for web, mobile, desktop, games, and IoT”

Over the years I’ve had quite a lot of trouble ensuring that new releases of Mono ran properly for the community. It was taking a lot of my time to build for different architectures, with different releases of Yocto, and to test and make sure things were minimally OK.

I’ve tried some different approaches over time, including cloud build providers and my own Jenkins installations.

But now I’ve finally come to where I’ve always wanted to be: With GitHub Actions workflows, leveraging self hosted runners on my own cloud hardware to build and test.

When contributors create a pull request multiple builds are kicked off (qemu-x86-64 and qemu-arm). These are then run up in architecture-specic QEMU virtual machines and a set of simple tests run using the Yocto Test Environment.

It makes life much easier doing some pre-qualification for contributions and makes me feel more confident that I can keep things working.”