Blog articles about embedded and technology topics

Imagine the liberty of being on a sailboat, alone, in the middle of the ocean. What skills would you require for that? First of all, basic (or even advanced) knowledge of sailing, you are all alone, with only the wind to help you move. Secondly, navigation, the art of knowing where you are, where you want to go, and how. Cooking, there are no delivery services possible, and you need to survive for over a month. Medical skills, if something goes wrong and you hurt yourself, you are the only first responder. Maintenance, fixing things that break down? And this is only part of a very long list.

In 1904, Orville Wright made the world’s first controlled and sustained flight in a powered aircraft. He flew a total of 23 metres. For the time, it was a breathtaking event. Less than a year later, his brother, Wilbur, flew over a kilometer. One hundred and fifteen years later, I flew 10,722 kilometers from Paris to Singapore. As far as firsts in aviation goes, It was far from breathtaking. It was totally normal, and just one of dozens of flights to arrive in Singapore that day, as they have been doing for years.

December 11th, 1998. The Mars Climate Orbiter lifts off, starting a voyage of over 200 million kilometers to Mars. Its mission was to survey the red planet, both the atmospheric conditions and any surface changes due to climate. It was part of a project to send several missions to Mars, and was to pave the way for future landers.

This entire system is a lot more than a simple alarm and it could be used as a base to make a free-floating bike system, or a connected bike. If you followed this tutorial from the start, you should know how to make one, the only step missing being the cloud connectivity part. Because we made a clean base of code, your bike is already ready to be a connected bike.

For now our alarm doesn’t make any noise, which is sad for an alarm. Let’s make some noise.

Our alarm is ready to work with other apps. So now we can develop other apps that provide other functions for our bike.

We have now our basic alarm working, but it is not really usable as a bike alarm yet. We will have to add some functionalities and make this app usable by any other app that could come complete our alarm.

The purpose of our bike alarm is to constantly measure bike movements and raise an alarm if the bike is moving.

In this tutorial series I’m going to show you how to make your own Luos app using a fully modular bike alarm as example.

Three years after its launch, the deeptech Luos announces a first round of fundraising of 1.2 million euros completed. A new key step that will allow the start-up to democratize its embedded open source technology in France, to double its workforce and to export its philosophy and methodology around the world. ​Luos’s ambition is to become a reflex for all embedded developers around the world !

Spoiler alert: this is the first and last Luos article that talks about lockdown. I wrote this article the day after it ended. We have just lived 8 peculiar weeks that drove us to review our way of working, our road-map, our objectives. Our goal was not only to survive but to optimize and adapt our business, our technical development and our marketing to the new situation! At Luos we are coming out of this period positively: we have done business, we have enlarged our community, and we have acquired users. At the cost of some acrobatics and concessions...

The way electronic devices are made never evolved: it’s still monolithic. Companies have to design everything, every time. We consider an electronic project to be 25% innovation and 75% re-inventing the wheel. Forcing them to deal with big risks, big money, and big skilled teams.

For a long time now, there has been talks of a robotic revolution which seems to be continually pushed back to the next day. Robot vacuum cleaners, IOT, the autonomous cars are the beginnings of this change. But why is it so slow?

This article is about the path taken during a couple years to explain what Luos is. Although Luos is a name for the company and the technology behind it, it’s the technology in particular I will mostly talk about, and how we sometimes struggled to explain it. Regarding the company in general, we will see why Luos is not a robotics company.

All the cheap neon letters are now lit up by your growing knowledge! We arrive at the last letter of PID: the letter D. Remember there is an introduction to PID, a proportional post for the P and an integral post for the I. It’s not the end, it’s only the beginning.

We go on with the PID letters. This post deals with the I. You can visit the first posts of this serie, the introduction to PID and the proportional post.

This post is the follow up of the introduction post to PID control for DC motors. They can be read by virtually anyone who can read English, but I highly suggest you to read the introduction post first, as well as the basics about motors listed at the end of this post.

In this post I will introduce to you the basics of PID control, and why it comes in handy for robotic applications. You don’t need much of background to read this, but knowing the basics of motors is always a good idea: my previous posts on this subject are listed here: Welcome to the jungle. Now it’s time for serious business.

This post is the follow-up of the Motors-in-robotics’ serie. Although what I will present you here is still basic notions and can be addressed to anyone keen on knowing more about it, don’t hesitate to have a look at the previous posts (types of motors in robotics, DC motor direction and speed control, how to read a datasheet), they will help you expand your knowledge about electric motors and start on good basis.

We go on deeper in the jungle. In this post I will show you that a motor’s datasheet is not always meant to help you starting a fire in your fireplace or to be thrown at a random colleague through the open-space. I explain here how to actually read and understand a motor’s datasheet. Anyone who knows the basics of DC motors can read this. If you feel that you miss some knowledge, go have a look to the previous posts in this serie.

The part 1 of this topic was about direction control of your DC motor. Today it’s time to have a look to speed control. Everyone who’s curious about robotic motorization basics can read this post, but I suggest you to begin with the guide to motors in robotics.

This post is dedicated to anyone who is curious about the basics of DC motors in robotics, and precisely how to control them. You can begin with the previous post dealing with the different kinds of motors used for robotic applications. While some of them are not often used, some others, as the DC brushed motor, are more common.

Iwill never forget that day. I’m being sentimental, but it was a rainy Sunday afternoon of late January. I was around 11 years old, I was sitting at my desk, and, most of all, I was deeply bored. The light was fading from the only window in my room and the air was almost gloomy, save the pale circle of yellow light from the desk lamp. Sunday-blues-before-Monday-School.

This post talks about basics of electric motors for robotic applications. It addresses to everyone who wants to know a little bit about motors. It’s not precise stuff, but future posts will dig deeper into the details of motorization and control in robotics.