Tendrl
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Guides & Updates
Practical tutorials and platform updates from the Tendrl team.
Idea on Saturday night, working camera product by Sunday morning
A safety-glasses camera on an OpenMV N6, from an idea to a working product in an evening and a morning. Claude did the building through tendrl-dev-mcp; the Tendrl client supplied the parts; every number was measured on the board.
Read → August 10, 2026A $5 XIAO ESP32C3 that keeps its own history
A Seeed Studio XIAO stores half an hour of readings in a database on the chip, publishes one summary a minute with 30-minute statistics in it, and hands over the raw window when something asks it for a closer look.
Read → July 26, 2026You don't need PSRAM
We measured the Tendrl MicroPython client on four boards with no PSRAM, including the newly supported Raspberry Pi Pico W. How you install it matters more than which chip you buy, and one result went the opposite way to what we expected.
Read → July 25, 2026You don't need a Raspberry Pi for that
For a device that reads, reports, and sleeps, a Pi is a computer you're paying to babysit. The full Tendrl client now fits on a $2 ESP32, with deep sleep at microamps and AI at both ends: on-chip vision on OpenMV cameras and frontier models via Strand.
Read → July 10, 2026Provision an IoT device from a browser tab, no CLI required
The Tendrl Device Console runs in Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Firefox and drives your MicroPython board over WebSerial. Terminal, code editor, and a one-form provisioning flow. No CLI, no mpremote, no AI required.
Read → July 6, 2026CircuitPython to Tendrl: pure MQTT, no SDK required
There's no tendrl package for CircuitPython, but Contact is just MQTT and JSON underneath. Connect with adafruit_minimqtt, publish sensor data, and receive commands back with zero SDK involved.
Read → July 1, 2026Motion-triggered video clips with OpenMV and MicroPython
Capture short video clips on motion detection, upload them securely through Contact, and review playable MP4s in the dashboard, all from a $65 camera board.
Read → April 3, 2026Full-Loop Workflows: Device to AI to Device
Build two complete workflows where IoT devices send data through Contact, Strand orchestrates AI and Surface scanning, and results flow back to the device.
Read → January 14, 2026Send ESP32 sensor data to Slack in 5 minutes
Connect a DHT22 temperature sensor to Tendrl with the MicroPython SDK, validate readings at ingress, and get Slack alerts when thresholds cross.
Read → March 1, 2026Stream an OpenMV camera to the cloud
Set up live JPEG streaming from an OpenMV Cam to the Tendrl dashboard with six lines of MicroPython.
Read →