Summary

On the days that my newspaper carrier decides to deliver the newspaper, you can be sure that it won’t be there before 4:00am or after 10:00am.  Why do I still get a newspaper?  Because my wife likes it.  The status of the delivery is a constant source of speculation in the morning.  Have you been out to the newspaper box?  Will you go?  etc.  So it seems only logical to make an IoT device that figures out if I have a newspaper.  Obviously this is a bit silly to put as much time and effort as I have into that simple task.  But, doing something cool has it own worth.  And it will give me a chance to use the new WICED XR (extended range) Bluetooth radio module CYBT-483039-02.

And here is a picture of the new module on the CYBT-483039-EVAL EZ-BT evaluation kit.

For this design I want

1. A newspaper sensor (not sure what that will be)
2. Waterproof case
3. A temperature sensor
4. A custom circuit board
5. A solar battery charger
6. The ability to program and debug the 20719 (which will be acting as a beacon)
7. An OTA Bootloader
8. A Real Time Clock
9. A wifi/ble bridge (inside the house)
10. Some cloud data capture and display
11. An iOS App

So far, this project has been quite a rabbit hole as I don’t/didn’t know anything about battery power supplies.  Specifically energy harvesting solar powered lithium ion battery chargers and system power supply.  Unfortunately Cypress doesnt make an IC that performs this application … so if you send Mouser a few hundred dollars and they will send you a box of a bunch of different Solar PMIC Evaluation kits, ST, TI, Linear, Analog Devices, and Microchip. (which I will write about in detail later)

Architecture

Here is a picture of the architecture.

In the next Article I will start the process of learning about Solar Battery Charging PMICs.