Monthly Archives: April 2016

Configuring Arduino IDE for use with Autonomo board and RN2483 Lora Shield

Much of the following set up is from the official Autonomo docs at but with a bit more detail and more screenshots.

  • Download the latest version of Arduino IDE (1.6.8 at time of writing) from https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
  • Extract archive and run the install script which will add an shortcut to the application to your main applications menu.
    Install Arduino IDE shortcuts
    Arduino IDE shortcut
  • If you are using Linux you will need to add yourself to the ‘dialout’ user group and logout and login for the change to take effect. This is so that you have permission to access the COM ports.
    Add user to dialout group
  • We then need to tell the Arduino IDE about our Sodaq Autonomo board. The Autonomo’s board profile is available through the Arduino Boards Manager. In order to install the board files you will need to first add the SODAQ board manager URL (http://downloads.sodaq.net/package_sodaq_index.json) to File->Preferences->Additional Board Manager URLs:
    Arduino IDE preferences
    Adding Sodaq boards profile
  • Once this is done we need to download the board profile for the Autonomo using Arduino IDE’s board manager.
    Board manager menu entry
  • Search for ‘sodaq’ click install for the latest Sodaq SAMD boards.
    Sodaq boards
  • You will now see the Autonomo board listed
    Autonomo board now listed
  • Now we have the board installed we need to install the Sodaq specific libraries that we are likely to use. We can do this using the library manager:
    Library manager
  • Search for ‘sodaq’ in the library manager and install the libraries you are likely to use
    sodaq libraries

Your Autonomo board is now configured on Arduino IDE and you can continue development as you would with any Arduino board.

Deploying Keys and Certs to a NodeJS app on AWS Opsworks

I have a nodejs app running on AWS deployed using AWS Opsworks. The app relies on an AWS IoT certificate and AWS IoT private key being present and I don’t want to add the key and certificate to my git repo.

The solution I ended with was to use the AWS Opsworks App environment variables to pass in the certificate and key as environment variables and read these from the nodejs app.

App Environment Variables

Opsworks replaces all new line characters with spaces so in our app we have to reverse this:

var iotcert = process.env.IOTCERT;
var iotkey = process.env.IOTKEY;
iotcert = iotcert.split(" ").join("\n").replace("BEGIN\nCERTIFICATE", "BEGIN CERTIFICATE").replace("END\nCERTIFICATE", "END CERTIFICATE");
iotkey = iotkey.split(" ").join("\n").replace("BEGIN\nRSA\nPRIVATE\nKEY", "BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY").replace("END\nRSA\nPRIVATE\nKEY", "END RSA PRIVATE KEY");

…. Problem solved 🙂

I suppose it is a little less secure than the certificate and key being on the file system and with read only access to the nodejs process but it’s a lot more secure than the certificate and key being hosted on github.