The primary goal of ANAVI Technology Ltd. is to combine open source hardware with free and open source software. So far numerous of our development boards have been certified by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). In February 2020 a couple new products were also certified: ANAVI Smiley and ANAVI Tag Manager. Both of them have been designed with the free and open source tool KiCad.
A lot of products on the market claim their are open source hardware, however this is not always true. Open Source Hardware certification allows the community to quickly identify hardware that truly complies with the definition of open source hardware. Because of this certification by OSHWA is important for us.
ANAVI Smiley
ANAVI Smiley add-on board for Raspberry Pi as a soldering kit
ANAVI Tag Manager with PN532 NFC RFID module and an acrylic enclosure
ANAVI Tag Manager is a WiFi development board for using PN532 NFC RFID module. The board is using ESP8266. It is powered from microUSB connector. There are slots for UART pins, mini OLED display and up to 3 I2C sensor modules. Furthermore there is also an extra GPIO pin for custom automation solutions. ANAVI Tag Manager is useful for various applications with NFC, including smart locks and payment systems. It has been certified by OSHWA with UID BG000062.
Stay tuned for new articles with details about both of these exciting new open source hardware gadgets!
ANAVI Miracle Controller is a new entirely open source development board for addressable (digital) LED strips like NeoPixels, WS2812B, WS2811, etc. The major advantages are that you can control two LED strips simultaneously, add a mini OLED display and I2C sensor modules as peripherals. Recently we launched a crowdfunding campaign for it at Crowd Supply.
ANAVI Miracle Controller
ANAVI Miracle Controller is a development board and it is easy to flash a custom firmware on it. The process is very similar as for our other open source project like ANAVI Thermometer, ANAVI Gas Detector and ANAVI Light Controller.
This tutorial explains the exact steps how to compile and upload the default open source Arduino sketch for ANAVI Miracle Controller using Arduino IDE.
Required Hardware
ANAVI Miracle Controller
USB to UART debug cable
Addressable LED strip
Appropriate power supply at 5V or 12V depending on the type of LED strips
Personal computer with MS Widows, Mac OS or GNU/Linux distribution
Optionally a mini OLED display and other peripherals can be attached
ANAVI Miracle Developer kit
Download Source Code from GitHub
The default firmware of ANAVI Miracle Controller is an open source Arduino sketch. It relies on several popular open source Arduino libraries, including FastLED for controlling addressable LED strips. Clone or download the source code from GitHub.
Connecting UART to USB
Each ANAVI Miracle Controller kit includes a USB to UART debug cable with CP2102. Depending on the operating system on your PC you might be required to install additional drives. It works out of the box on GNU/Linux distributions. As open source enthusiasts we are using it on Ubuntu. Plug the USB in your computer and connect the 3 wires as follows:
ANAVI Miracle Controller
USB to UART Debug Cable
RX
TX
TX
RX
GND
GND
Connecting USB to UART cable to ANAVI Miracle Controller
Download Arduino IDE
Download and install Arduino IDE on your personal computer. It is free and open source software available for MS Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux distributions.
Launch Arduino IDE. From File > Open load an Arduino sketch. It can be the default firmware or any other compatible with ANAVI Miracle Controller Arduino sketch.
Configure ESP8266 in Arduino IDE
Go to File > Preferences. Select Settings and in the field Additional Boards Manager URLs add: http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
From Arduino IDE select Tools > Board: Generic ESP8266 Module. Set the flash size to 4M (1M SPIFFS). The upload speed is 115200. Adjust the exact port of USB to serial debug cable connected to your computer.
In Arduino IDE click Verify/Compile. If there are any errors, please double check that you have installed all required libraries and their exact versions. If the source code compiles successfully, please proceed to to the next step for flashing the firmware.
Set the jumper to 5V or 12V depending on the type of addressable LED strip and power supply. Mismatch of the voltage may lead to severe hardware failure.
In Arduino IDE click Upload. Set the jumper on ANAVI Miracle Controller to 5V or 12V depending on your power supply and type of LED strips. The power supply voltage must match the required voltage by the LED strips, for example 5V for NeoPixels and the WS2812B included in all kits. Press and hold the RESET button on ANAVI Miracle Controller. Without releasing the RESET button, plug the power supply in the barrel jack of ANAVI Miracle Controller.
Do NOT release the RESET button until you see in Arduino IDE that the upload is 100% completed!
ANAVI Miracle Controller with 2 WS2812B LED strips connected to a laptop using USB to UART cable
How often do you get software or firmware updates for a 2-year-old device? Probably not very often. This is not the case for ANAVI Light Controller! We have a major update of its Arduino sketch for you.
ANAVI Light Controller
ANAVI Light Controller open source hardware WiFi device for controlling a 12V RGB LED strip. It was brought to life through a crowdfunding campaign at Crowd in 2018. Now is January 2020, so this makes it ~2 years old! A lot of things have changed during this time. ANAVI Light Controller has been certified by Open Source Hardware Association (OSHA) and it now on sale at our distributors: Crowd Supply, Pi Supply and neven.cz.
Terminals for connecting 12V RGB LED strip to ANAVI Light Controller
Support Home Assistant automatic discovery over MQTT
Turn on LED D1 on ANAVI Light Controller if the device is not connected to local WiFi network and needs initial configuration
Wait for a few seconds while LED D1 is blinking immediately after turning on ANAVI Light Controller to allow reset by keeping SW1 pressed
Append the last 5 characters of the machine ID to the WiFi Access Point (AP) to simplify the identification of the ANAVI Light Controller during the initial setup
Support MQTT messages with large payload for reporting back the current state of the RGB LED strips on topic stat/dev-id/color
Add DEBUG macros, disabled by default, if enabled additional debug information will be printed in the serial monitor
Changing colors of 12V RGB LED strip through Home Assistant using ANAVI Light Controller
Andrey Kozhevnikov a.k.a. CODeRUS, a talented software engineer and a very skilled maker, used ANAVI Miracle Controller and addressable (digital) LED strips to decorate his Christmas tree and to control it with voice commands through Google Assistant and Home Assistant. Home Assistant is a popular open source platform for home automation. Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that recognizes speech and voice commands. CODeRUS shared a short video in twitter with the amazing result!
As a small gift for the leading contributor to the Arduino sketch for another of our open source projects, ANAVI Light Controller, we sent one of the first stable prototypes of ANAVI Miracle Controller to CODeRUS. We were sure that he will make something interesting with it. His amazing creativity is always inspiring!
CODeRUS Новогодняя ёлка
CODeRUS is also well known in the open source communities because of his numerous contributions over the years to Maemo, MeeGo and Sailfish OS. These names ring a bell in any die-hard open source fan as they were/are brands of GNU/Linux distributions for smartphones, most notably Nokia models like N900 (Maemo) and N9 (MeeGo Harmattan) made a decade ago.
Home Assistant is a popular open source platform for home automation. It is written in Python programming language and runs perfectly on Raspberry Pi 3 B/B+ or 4 B. Now, with the latest updates of the Arduino sketch for ANAVI Light Controller it is super easy to control 12V RGB LED strip from Home Assistant through your smartphone, tablet or personal computer.
Have a look at the video and follow the steps below to configure ANAVI Light Controller and change colors of 12V RGB LED strips from Home Assistant.
Install Mosquitto from Hass.io add-on store. Set username and password for login to Mosquitto. Set active Access Control Lists (ACL) for the username and launch Mosquitto (it is recommended to install SSH server prior this step).
Add MQTT integration in Home Assistant with enabled discovery (from Configuration > Integrations)
Attach the 12V RGB LED strip to ANAVI Light Controller
Turn on ANAVI Light Controller, connect to its WiFi Access Point (AP) and configure it through the captive portal. You must provide your WiFi credentials, MQTT server, username and password. After that ANAVI Light Controller will be automatically discovered by Home Assistant over MQTT.
Through Home Assistant change colors or effects of ANAVI Light Controller.
As soon as ANAVI Light Controller boots, after it has been configured, it connects to the WiFi network, after that to the MQTT broker and sends retained MQTT message with JSON payload that describes the device. Each ANAVI Light Controller has a unique MD5 ID based on the chip ID of ESP8266. The MQTT integration in Home Assistant discovers ANAVI Light Controller based on the received MQTT message. Thanks to the data in the JSON payload Home Assistant automatically configures the device as MQTT Light.
Home Assistant & 12V RGB LED strip attached to ANAVI Light Controller
Home Assistant discovery is a user-friendly way for quickly adding new Internet of Things to the platform. Combined with MQTT and the default firmware for ANAVI Light Controller the process is straight-forward and anyone can do it in a few minutes.
Mini monochrome OLED I2C displays are cheap, reliable and easy to use by makers. They come in a huge variety of sizes. Our open source hardware Internet of Things, like ANAVI Thermometer and ANAVI Gas Detector, support this type of display and all kits include a particular yellow-blue model that is a bit below 1”. The display has 4 mounting holes. The screen resolution is 128×64 pixels. The driver is SSD1306. You can find exactly the same type of display with only white OLED pixels. The usage is the same no matter what is the color of the OLED pixels.
ANAVI Thermomter with yellow-blue mini OLED I2C display
In this video tutorial you will learn the exact steps how to get started with I2C OLED mini display with about 1” diagonal on Arduino compatible board such as our ANAVI Thermometer. ANAVI Thermomter is an ESP8266-powered, open source, Wi-Fi dev board with temperature and humidity sensors.
There is a huge variety on the market of analog MQ gas sensor modules for Arduino compatible devices. In this article we will focus on MQ-135. This low-cost analog sensor is used in air quality control equipment for buildings and offices. It is suitable for detecting of NH3, NOx, alcohol, Benzene, smoke, CO2 and other dangerous gases.
