SODAQ has some new NB-IoT and LTE boards, but I fear with 100 EUR a bit too expensive for us:
Hi, the problem is that all is depending on volumes. We are working on several NB-IoT boards - eg. a small breakout for ublox module which can be integrated to all microcontrollers via uart. If you collect all your needs we can make a collected order to try reduce prices…
Hi @Lyn my kind of reference are this two extem positions:
Variant 1 is a ultra low cost and flexible option:
Arduino Pro Mini or ESP32 + RFM95 + SIM800 (or 808 with GPS)
- let’s say MC is 10 EUR, LoRa: 5 EUR, GSM 7 with GPS 12, we are at around 30 EUR für Qt 1 at ebay, in case you order from china, accept a longer shipping periode and order higher Qt. you can go down to 15 - 20 EUR or less.
- you need a PCB, let’s say 2 EUR
- soldering at home – DIY
Variant 2 is a highly integrated board like the
FiPy – or LoPy for LoRa only / GPy LTE only – by PyCom
- but 30 - 55 EUR
- ok, we need also a PCB for screw terminals and the HX711 or an other chip for load cell integration
- you are relying on this one company, in case PyCom changes the strategy you may not get this boards or to a higher price
For our project we can not use a naked dev board only, we need the load cell integration, we are planing I2S audio in the next development step, solid wire and sensor connectins. so a special designed PCB is a robust way. but it should be also posible to use our design and software for people with stripboards also.
We have started with a solution for a nicely integrated (nearly) all-in-one board the Seeeduino Stalker and have seen that Seeed did a realy bad job and messed up the new version 3.1 so that is is still usable for us but with disadvantages compared to the last version and I personally do not calculate with a revision of this board. So I think 3.1 will be the last version of this board and so is a blind alley for us. This experience let me hesitate to jump on the PyCom boards or also the SODAQ boards will not have long life cycles.
We have used the SIM800 GPRSbees from SODAQ with the SODAQ lib, sime have tried the tinyGSM lib also. For LoRa we have used the arduino-lmic. We have not used ublox till now. What software implementaion do you use for ublox?
Hi, we have created a first version of an Arduino Library especially to be interconnected to the Telekom Cloud of things using MQTT-SN. We use Quectel and ublox because they use the same firmware from huawei ;)
From the DT you can access their MQTT broker to subscribe to the information and push it to your cloud backend. However, at the moment there is a defined set of data types available (like Temperature, humidtiy, location etc.)
Because of the low volumes hardware is very expensive at the moment. We are also working with the pycom modules and are expecting the NB-IoT firmware within the next couple of weeks.
Nice interview with Jan Willem Smeenk and Ollie Smeenk from SODAQ on the 2019th TTN Conference.