The Things Conference is taking place now until January 31, so we should expect a few LoRaWAN announcements, and yesterday we covered Semtech LLCC68 LoRa transceiver for smart home applications, but the company also introduced a LoRa asset tracking reference kit to ease the deployment and evaluation of LoRa based tracking solutions.
The kit is comprised of one LoRaWAN gateway, and six waterproof trackers with GPS and LoRa connectivity which everything supposed to work out of the box.
The gateway, as shown above, comes with LoRa, cellular and GPS antennas, as well as a PoE power supply. It ships with a pre-configured SIM card to connect to the cloud platform over 3G/4G.
Six industrial LoRaWAN-based GPS trackers are also included with the kit. Each comes with a battery but the trackers need to be activated by the user. Interestingly they are not using a button to turn on and off the tracker, but instead, activation is made via a magnet that comes with the kit. I can only think this was done to make the tracker as waterproof as possible. The trackers are rated to work in -21 to +60°C temperature range.
The tracker can be attached to a pallet thanks to two mounting holes, placed in the bag of a bicycle, or anywhere in a vehicle. After activation of the trackers with the magnet, you’ll be able to track assets from a web-based dashboard.
Once customers have completed evaluation with the Semtech asset tracking reference kit, they can purchase more trackers and gateways as needed as the kit consists of sensors and gateways that are available on the market. Semtech did not disclose which ones exactly, but I can understand why since they may not favor one of their customer of the others.
The LoRa asset tracking reference kit appears to be available now, but it not offered for purchase online. Instead, interested companies can contact Semtech by email. They also mention one can find more details on the developer website, but I cannot see any information about the reference kit apart from the press release.
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.
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