Well, I’m still not back on a boat as I was in 2023… Where to start…
Lightbug
I havn’t written a whole lot about Lightbug yet on this blog, but its still been a fun year of new developments at, and I think it’s time to share some of them with pictures ;)
We released small handheld RTK device, with programmable ESP32 onboard, giving high precision accuracy, in a nice small package.
I’v enjoyed seeing how folks have been using these devices, from tracking lane changes in cars, to finding accuract path positions, or traking things around race courses.
You can find the documentaiton to read through on the docs site, a fancy looking marketing booklet on the website or look at some of the code examples for the programmable ESP32 also on the docs site.
Hopfully this year I’ll get to the point of writing my GPS, RTK, phone etc comparison blog post, comparing the tracks recorded from a bunch of different devices to compare accuracy etc.
Given my open source / open data interests, I do wonder if this will end up being useful for the OpenStreetMap community.
Now we also developed and worked on the ZCard device, though this has primarily remained inhouse, or for show and conferences and workshops. So much so, that there isn’t even a picture of one on the Lightbug website yet, but here is one sitting on one of our tshirts bak at MWC earlier this year, where we had a demo application running on it, allowing basic interactions from a web page.
Think of it kind of like a Flipper Zero in a way, but running the same hardware and firmware stack as the rest of the Lightbug devices, at a fraction of the price, focued on developers. Buttons, Lights, Eink screen, but more importantly, cellular connectivity (GSM LTE CAT 1), LORA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more.
The primary processor, and high levels SDKs take care of the complexities of connectivity, power management and eink screen renderings, and give you a high level API for interacting the the device in many ways, such as drawing on the screen, communicating over LORA, or connecting to a server to send and receive data.
Wikimedia
Meanwhile, in my non work Wikimedia volunteer time, I have the privilege of attending both Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, as well as the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey.
