Top all-time · #4732
The Thingsquare Blog
Company blog · thingsquare.com/blog/articles · on HN as retSavahardwaresystems
The Thingsquare Blog is the company blog at thingsquare.com, writing about hardware and systems. Since 2012, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Cloudless IoT: The Internet of Things, Without the Cloud”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Thingsquare's posts on low-power wireless, mesh networking and IoT firmware, such as a sensor running a year on a coin cell and a 100-hop IPv6 mesh. Commenters cite them as technical reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Cloudless IoT: The Internet of Things, Without the Cloud3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-11-25
- Build a Plant Monitoring Prototype Like a Pro (and for Under 100 Dollars)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-08-25
- Contiki-based product "Thingsquare Mist" to make Internet of Things simple3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-09-26
- More Power, Less Power, Unlimited Power: Improve the Life of Your IoT System2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-04-18
- A New Way to Measure the Power of Low-Power Hardware (for Software People)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-12-07
- What Happens Inside a 100-hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-09-07
- The IoT Without the Internet: 3 Use Cases2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-20
- What Happens Inside a 100-Hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-07
- Thingsquare Code: program the Internet of Things from your browser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-13
- /docs/mesh/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-09
What Hacker News says?
Although this is pretty far away from the Arduino-style boards, you may want to have a look at the Sensortag from Texas Instruments: http://www.ti.com/sensortag It is based on a single-chip wireless microcontroller that has both support for both BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 (6lowpan/ZigBee). It is supported by the Contiki OS ( http://www.contiki-os.org/ ). The learning curve is probably quite a bit steeper than that of an…
Comment linking /blog/articles/proximity-control/
on “Arduino in the size of a AA battery”Submitted rand() may call malloc() as a story · 212 points
HN discussionI can't speak for the creators of Flutter, but I can definitely attest to that TCP/IP with full mesh routing should be doable with the Flutter hardware. We (Thingsquare) have the CC1101 as one of our supported hardware platforms and use it to run full TCP/IPv6 networking over a self-forming mesh. The system is used in a number of commercial products and systems. The chip-level firmware is open source so I guess the…
Comment linking /tech/
on “Flutter: $20 Wireless Arduino with 1 km range”Submitted How to run a city-wide wireless network from a drawer as a story · 207 points
HN discussionThis seems a lot like a response to Google's Nest acquisition. Google and Apple are rapidly moving in to an area with a lot of activity. There has been a recent surge of home automation startups and platforms like Revolv ( http://revolv.com/ ), SmartThings ( http://www.smartthings.com/ ), WigWag ( http://www.wigwag.com/ ). One of the problems they are addressing is how to marge multiple different home automation sta…
Comment linking /
on “HomeKit”Submitted How to Make a Wireless Sensor Live for a Year on One Tiny Coin Cell Battery as a story · 153 points
HN discussionNo problem, I'm happy to share what I've learned! Yeah, connecting to the web can be stressful to a small device, but it's very feasible. A basic OS that handles timers, a communication stack, a way to abstract tasks and communicate between them, can be quite small. Contiki OS for small devices can run on tiny devices - the amount of RAM and flash and CPU speed isn't much a limiting factor until you start with commu…
Comment linking /blog/articles/ti-cc1350-power-consumption/
on “Battery-Free Cell Phone”Submitted What Happens Inside a 100-Hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network? as a story · 137 points
HN discussionhttps://www.thingsquare.com/blog/articles/sensortag-power/ You would be suprised what you can pull off with wireless sensors. These people pulled off 1 year with a 2032 battery.
Comment linking /blog/articles/sensortag-power/
on “High-power thermoelectric generator utilises thermal difference of only 5°C”Submitted What Happens Inside a 100-hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network? as a story · 67 points
HN discussionWell sure, a hardware company isn't going to buy this. Check their pricing page. http://www.thingsquare.com/start/ This is the Arduino business model-- easy introductory hardware for beginners. An actual hardware company wouldn't buy these for the same reason a router company wouldn't buy Cisco hardware and tape over the logos: there wouldn't be any margin. I would characterize GGP's argument as more that this isn't…
Comment linking /start/
on “How to Make a Wireless Sensor Live for a Year on One Tiny Coin Cell Battery”Submitted IoT Network Watches You as You Shop – Without Cameras as a story · 66 points
HN discussionTheir platform is built on contiki according to https://www.thingsquare.com/docs/firmware-sdk-do-donts/
Comment linking /docs/firmware-sdk-do-donts/
on “What Happens Inside a 100-Hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?”Submitted Designing a Wireless Device That Lives Forever as a story · 59 points
HN discussionAuthor of miniweb and uIP here. uIP is a real IPv4 stack, with all the needed bells and whistles, but miniweb really is only a super-specific proof-of-concept that is not particularly useful for anything else than demonstrating that it can be done. While something like uIP definitely can be used (and is being used) for IoT applications, uIP only is an IPv4 endpoint. Most IoT applications have a wireless communicatio…
Comment linking /mist/
on “The world's smallest ARM chip announced, designed for swallowable computers”Submitted How to build a wireless street lighting system as a story · 48 points
HN discussion(Adam, Thingsquare CEO here) The routing protocol is called RPL (pronounced "ripple") and is designed to create a directed acyclic graph to route IPv6 packets in networks where the nodes are severely memory-constrained. It is defined by RFC6550. There is more information in http://www.thingsquare.com/docs/mesh/ and https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6550 There is no hard limit to the number of nodes in a RPL network. Th…
Comment linking /docs/mesh/
on “What Happens Inside a 100-hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?”Submitted Contiki-based product "Thingsquare Mist" to make Internet of Things simple as a story · 19 points
HN discussionFredrik, Thingsquare CTO here. We have a bit more detailed information about how we use mesh and RPL here: http://www.thingsquare.com/docs/mesh/ Regarding mobility, we're using a number of tricks and custom solutions to discover and quickly join new networks/parents - in vanilla RPL networks it sometimes takes a long time to drop a bad or distant parent, causing long delays for mobile devices.
Comment linking /docs/mesh/
on “What Happens Inside a 100-hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?”Submitted Thingsquare Code: program the Internet of Things from your browser as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYes, a transmit-only approach would be the most power-saving approach here, but you'd lose the ability to adjust configuration on-the-fly, and firmware updates over the air (FOTA), among other things. LoRa has excellent long-range properties thanks to sub-GHz, modulation, and low bit-rate, but you can just barely send something back to it and certainly not FOTA it. The device used in the example post (and here: http…
Comment linking /blog/articles/sensortag-power/
on “Designing a Wireless Device That Lives Forever”Submitted Thingsquare Mist - Connect Everything to the Internet as a story · 7 points
HN discussionAccording to Thingsquare, Tado is using their firmware [1], Mist, based off of the open source Contiki [2]. This is pretty cool, as it enables a ton of features like over the air firmware updates or running your own applications. I'm especially curious how they added bluetooth and ibeacon support into this. [1] http://thingsquare.com/customers/ [2] http://www.contiki-os.org/
Comment linking /customers/
on “Tado Cooling – Intelligent AC control”Submitted Thingsquare out of private beta as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is a few years old and leaves out 6LoWPAN[1], which wasn't yet commercially viable. 6LoWPAN is based on the same 802.15.4 hardware that ZigBee uses, but it has two significant advantages over ZigBee. First, it is TCP/IP that works on microcontrollers, so embedded devices running the protocol become first-class members of the internet with the addition of a very inexpensive router[2] to the network. This means t…
Comment linking /
on “Comparing Low-Power Wireless Technologies (2011)”Submitted Thingsquare Code - Program the Internet of Things as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Also, why would you bother to handle it gracefully when the OS won't allow you to do it? There are many situations where you can get an allocation failure even with over provisioning enabled. > Just don't use VLAs if then? "Problem" solved. Yes, just don't use that language feature that is visually identical to a normal array. Then make sure that your standard library implementation doesn't have random malloc call…
Comment linking /blog/articles/rand-may-call-malloc/
on “Is RAM wiped before use in another LXC container?”Submitted Build to Validate, Not Illustrate as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Happens Inside a 100-hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cloudless IoT: The Internet of Things, Without the Cloud as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
