There are many WiFi and/or Bluetooth board designed for the Internet of Things thanks to ESP8266 / ESP32, and other solutions, but usually they all work in the 2.4 GHz frequency band which can be an issue in crowded environments. Last October, we covered ucRobotics Ivy5661 96Boards compliant IoT board that offers a dual core Arm Cortex-M4F MCU with 802.11ac WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity.
It was still under development at the time, but today, I’ve noticed it was listed on Seeed Studio for $35 with shipping scheduled for the end of February.
ucRobotics Ivy5661 board specifications:
- SoC – UniSoC UWP5661 dual core Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller @ 416 MHz manufactured with 28nm process
- Storage – 32Mbit NOR flash
- Connectivity (built in SoC)
- Dual band 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO WiFi 5 up to 866MHz; supports repeater mode, RTT indoor positioning
- Bluetooth 5 with support for high power mode, BT mesh, and AOD indoor positioning features
- USB – 2x Micro USB ports
- Expansion Interface – 96boards LS (Low Speed) connector with UART, I2C, SPI, I2S, GPIO
- Misc – 4x user LED, 2x reset and user button
- Power Supply – 5V via Micro USB port
- Dimensions – 60 x 30 mm (96Boards IoT edition form factor)
Ivy5661 runs Zephyrs OS with all documentation available on 96Boards website, but it still looks WiP at the time of writing.
The board will ship with two SMA antennas, and targets intelligent household, IP camera, repeater Wi-Fi amplifier, high-fidelity audio system, and other networking applications.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
How much is a UWP5661? I don’t see it listed anywhere.
This chip could be anywhere from $4 to $15. Hard to evaluate how useful it is without knowing the price.
It is made by unisoc ( RDA + Spectrum ) , if it helps
This has some potetential to connect BLE sensors to the cloud. Old ESP-IDF had some stability issues when Wi-Fi and BLE were used concurrently. I don’t know if this situation improved since.
They mention 6LoWPAN on Seeed website which is based on 802.15.4. I guess that this is a mistake due to copy-pasting from Zephyr documentation.