Research & Development

COM port parser.  Those who deal with hardware often need to read messages from devices connected to your PC over COM ports. This Windows desktop utility helps to read, log and visualize messages from a COM port. Here below I'll provide the details of how to use the utility. COM port settings This part of UI allows to choose the appropriate settings. First of all select from the list the corresponding COM port your hardware device connected to. Then select appropriate baudrate, number of bits, options for parity and stop bits. Once ready click  Open . The default settings are 9600,8,N,1. Data log settings Once the port is correctly opened the utility can log arriving messages to a .txt file. The default name for the log file is generated automatically as  hhmmss_ddmmyyyy_comport_log.txt . You may change the name and directory. Click  Start  to start writing the messages and  Stop  to finish it. You may also add a timestamp to ev...

This post is just an introduction to a series of publications about a custom indoor air quality device connected to IoT back-end.  (I hope, I'll be able to manage my laziness  and procrastination) The publications will describe a whole ecosystem which includes a sensing device, IoT cloud service, back-end and Telegram bot to get aware about your indoor air quality. Also maybe I'll ad something about the analysis of data.  Look at the picture below, this is a better explanation of the ecosystem than description by words. In the next posts I'll explain how to build your own sensing device to measure the quality of indoor air, what are the most relevant air quality parameters compared to well-known outdoor air quality, which sensors available on mass market are most suitable to measure those parameters. There are many tricky questions here. How the optical particulate sensors measure the weight of particles? Why it seems to make not that much sense to meas...