La COOL Board

What is La COOL Board?

La COOL Board is a connected environmental monitoring and control board. It can be used to build custom weather stations, self-watering plants, hydroponic control systems, pH probes, and many other things. It's also extensible and compatible with numerous external sensors and actuators.

Key features and benefits

• 100% Arduino compatible
• Supported by an Espressif's ESP8266, including onboard WiFi
• 7 onboard sensors: IR and visible light, UV index, atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, soil moisture.
• Onboard RTC Clock
• USB to serial UART with onboard FTDI chip (female micro-USB port)
• NeoPixel Digital RGB programmable LED
• Solar panel and LiPo battery plug
• Fully makeable, hackable and customizable open-hardware

How to make it?

Have a look at our Eagle files - but you can also buy it from us! Don't hesitate to contact or check out our website

What is this repository for?

It contains a set of Arduino libraries, wrappers and sketches that simplify the access to and usage of the sensors and other hardware features provided by La COOL Board.

How does it operates?

The default operating mode of La COOL Board is sleep mode, which uses the deep-sleep low-energy consumption mode of the ESP8266 (80µA). It is on by default and should be enabled whenever your board:

• runs on battery power (e.g. in a weather station)
• runs on AC power, but logs data at a very slow rate. It's time to do you part in saving the planet!

If you need a higher sample rate, you may want to deactivate it.

When in sleep mode, your COOL Board will run the following loop:

1. read sensors values
2. activate actuators
3. log data (either locally or over the network)
4. check for updates
5. go to sleep for logInterval seconds

How can I contribute?

For minor fixes of code and documentation, please go ahead and submit a pull request.

Larger changes (rewriting parts of existing code from scratch, adding new functions to the core, adding new libraries) should generally be discussed by opening an issue first.

Feature branches with lots of small commits (especially titled "oops", "fix typo", "forgot to add file", etc.) should be squashed before opening a pull request. At the same time, please refrain from putting multiple unrelated changes into a single pull request.

How can I reach you guys?

If you encounter a problem, have some genius, crazy idea or just want to have a chat with us, please open an issue, a pull request or send us an email at team@lacool.co - we'd absolutely love to hear from you !

How do I get set up?

First steps

1. Install Platform IO core

2. Break out the sensor board and insert its pins into the main board header

3. Connect the COOL Board to your computer and ensure you that your switch is in the LOAD position

4. On a terminal, enter

    git clone https://github.com/LaCoolCo/LaCOOLBoard.git`
    cd LaCoolBoard`
    patch/patch.sh`
   

5. Go to [www.lecool.menu], create an account and choose Join us

6. Contact La COOL Co via mail (team@lacool.co) to ask for your certificate and private keys. We'll provide you with two files : privateKey.bin and certificate.bin

   • Save privateKey.bin in examples/WeatherStation/data/privateKey.bin
   • Save cerificate.bin in examples/weatherStation/data/certificate.bin

7. In your terminal, type

    pio run -e prod -t uploadfs`
   

8. Hit the RESET switch, then type

    pio run -e prod -t upload`
   

9. Put the side switch back in RUN position & press the RESET button

10. After a few seconds, you COOL Board LED should glow purple to signal that the onboard Wifi access point has started. You'll now need to:

11. connect your computer (or phone/tablet) to the Wifi network named CoolBoard-XXXXXXXXXXXX

12. open http://192.168.4.1 in your browser.

13. click configure Wifi

14. Select the Wifi network you want your board to connect to and enter its password

Configuration files

The COOL Board embedded software makes heavy use of the SPIFFS for storing its configuration and data files. Here is a description of the configuration files and keys.

coolBoardConfig.json

• logInterval: time interval in seconds between two log events.
• ireneActive: set this to true if you are using the IRN3000 module
• jetpackActive: set this to true if you are using the JetPack module
• externalSensorsActive: set to true if you are using a supported external sensor
• sleepActive: set to true if you want your COOL Board to enable sleep mode
• userActive: set this to true if you want your COOL Board to collect userData (userName, macAddress, timeStamp)
• manual: set this to true to enable MQTT remote-control of onboard actuators, bypassing rule-based configuration. Be extremely careful with this mode: when it is active, the COOL Board will not restart automatically to apply any new configuration sent on the update MQTT topic. Plus, restarting a COOL Board in manual mode will disable all the actuators. Thus, never forget to reset this to false to go back to normal mode!

coolBoardLedConfig.json

• ledActive: Put this flag to 1(true) if you want to turn on the onboard LED.

coolBoardSensorsConfig.json

• temperature: set this to true if you want to sample temperature using the BME280 Sensor
• humidity: set this to true if you want to sample air humidity using the BME280 Sensor
• pressure: set this to true if you want to collect atmospheric pressure using the BME280 Sensor
• visible: set this to true if you want to collect the visible light index using the SI114X Sensor
• ir: set this to true if you want to measure the infrared light using the SI114X Sensor
• uv: set this to true if you want to measure ultraviolet index using the SI114X Sensor
• vbat: set this to true if you want to measure battery voltage
• soilMoisture: set this to true if you want to activate the soil moisture sensor
• wallMoisture: set this to true if you want to use the moisture sensor for wall/wood moisture sensing. soilMoisture MUST be false in this case

externalSensorsConfig.json

• sensorsNumber: the number of supported external sensors you connect to the COOL Board
• reference: the reference of a supported external sensor (e.g. NDIR_I2C, Dallas Temperature...)
• type: the type of measurment you are taking (e.g. CO2, temperature, voltage...)
• address: the sensor's address, if it has one (e.g. NDIR_I2C CO2 sensor's address is 77)
• kind0...kind4: names of the sensors sensor connected to ADCs models ADS1015 and ADS1115 (kind0 is sensor on A0, kind1 is A1, and so on)

irene3000Config.json

• waterTemp.active: set to true to use the temperature sensor connected to the Irene3000
• phProbe.active: set to true to use the ph sensor connected to the Irene3000
• adc2.active: set to true to use the extra ADC input of the Irene3000
• adc2.gain: this is the value of the gain applied to the extra ADC input of the Irene3000
• adc2.type: the type of measurements you are making (e.g. CO2, temperature,voltage...)

jetPackConfig.json and coolBoardActorConfig.json

• Act[i].actif: set this to true in order to use the jetpack output #i (0 to 7)
• Act[i].inverted: set this to true if the actor is inverted (e.g. a cooler is turned on when Temp > TempMax)
• Act[i].temporal: set this to true if you want the actor to turn on or off based on time of day.
• Act[i].type: [ <primaryType>, <secondaryType> ]: this array contains the primary type and the secondary type of the actuator
  • primaryType : type of the sensor (e.g. if Temperature, actuator is associated to the "Temperature" sensor).
  • secondaryType is only used in temporal mode. It can be:
    • "" (empty): the actor will be on for timeHigh ms and off for timeLow ms
    • "hour": the actor will be on when current hour is greater than or equal to hourHigh. and off when greater than or equal to hourLow.
    • "minute": the actor will be on when the current minute is greater than or equal to minuteHigh, and off when greater than or equal to minuteLow
    • "hourMinute": behavior of both "minute" and "hour"
• Act[i].low[rangeLow,timeLow,hourLow,minuteLow]: this array contains the low values of the activation range
  • rangeLow is the minimum sensor value at which to turn on (or off in inverted mode) the actor
  • timeLow is the time spent off in temporal mode
  • hourLow is the hour to turn off the actor when secondaryType is hour or hourMinute
  • minuteLow is the minute to turn off the actor when secondaryType is minute or hourMinute
• Act[i].high[rangeHigh,timeHigh,hourHigh,minuteHigh]: this array contains the high values of the activation range
  • rangeHigh is the maximum of the range at which to turn off (or on in inverted mode) the actor
  • timeHigh is the time spent on in temporal mode
  • hourHigh is the hour to turn on the actor when secondaryType is hour or hourMinute
  • minuteHigh is the minute to turn on the actor when secondaryType is minute or hourMinute

Note that coolBoardActorConfig.json contains only one actor.

mqttConfig.json

• mqttServer: MQTT server IP address or hostname

rtcConfig.json

• NTP: set to true if you want the RTC to synchronize with a NTP Pool. Disable this if you don't have an Internet connection!
• timePool: indicates the NTP Server with the lowest latency in CoolTime.h
• timeSync: the last time the board updated the RTC (UNIX Time). By default, La COOL Board tries to update once a week.

wifiConfig.json

• timeOut: access point timeout in seconds