Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 144 Comments on Giveaway Week 2023 – GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router devkit

Giveaway Week 2023 – GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router devkit

It’s already day 4 of CNX Software Giveaway Week 2023 and today, we’ll be giving away GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border router kit that also includes three USB or battery-powered Thread development boards to experiment with various Thread topologies.

The GL-S200 router comes with a Qualcomm QCA9531 MIPS router processor running a fork of OpenWrt and provides two Fast Ethernet WAN/LAN ports, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 802.11b/g/n up to 150 Mbps, and support for Thread (via an 802.15.4 radio) and Bluetooth 5.0. The development boards are based on the Nordic Semi nRF52840 microcontroller and each features a potentiometer+button, a PIR sensor, and two RGB LEDs.

Getting Started GL-S200 Thread Border Router

I reviewed the GL-S200 Thread Border router kit using the router’s dashboard interface and demo firmware provided for the three development boards. This enabled me to test star topology and mesh networking, and play around with demo scripts and code samples to display sensor and potentiometer data or control the RGB LEDs using a COAP client or/and Lua code.

Finally, I also managed to send messages to Telegram each time motion was detected in my office through the PIR sensor of one of the modules thanks to support for Webhooks in the router’s dashboard. The kit was fun to experiment with, but practical applications may be limited since the router only supports the provided development boards unless GL.iNet modifies the router’s source code for your project.

GL-S200 Thread Border Router Devkit Giveaway

The giveaway includes the complete kit with the GL-S200 Border Router itself, a USB power supply and US/US/UK plug adapters, an Ethernet cable, the three Thread development boards/nodes, a Quick Start Guide, and a Warranty card that’s probably useless since it’s a review sample…

To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say (no links in the body of the comment). If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows:

  • Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address.
  • Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 am (Bangkok time) every day.
  • Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on.
  • Winners will be selected with random.org, and announced in the comments section of each giveaway.
  • I’ll contact the winner by email, and I’ll expect an answer within 24 hours, or I’ll pick another winner. Note that I may not be able to contact people who log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so it’s better to use an email address to enter the draw.
  • Shipping
    • $24 for registered airmail small packet or ePacket for overseas shipping payable via PayPal within 48 hours once the contest (for a given product) is complete. If PayPal is not an option in your country, we can try to find another payment solution.
    • All prizes will be shipped at the same time once we get all the winners, so around November 15.
  • I’ll make sure we have 7 different winners, so if you have already won a device during this giveaway week, I’ll draw another person.

The kit currently retails for $154 plus shipping.

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144 Replies to “Giveaway Week 2023 – GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router devkit”

  21. Hungary – I hope Thread will provide more compatibility between devices from different vendors than Zigbee, that’s really a pain point for me now (with Zigbee).

  57. Belgium

    My excuse to say comment something:
    I’ve been reading for about a year now, and damn, how have I missed this site for so many years. Daily source of geeky DIY info, love it, thank you!

  65. United Kingdom, it’s cool that they include some Dev boards to test with, though I’d want to add them into Google Home

  72. From Belgium.
    Always nice to experiment with new tech. Thread is certainly on my list.
    This looks like a nice kit to start with. (Actually, to continue, 😉 )

  95. Hello from Canada. I probably would have bought this after your first reviews if I knew for sure it would work with Matter. I can’t see any reason it won’t though, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t adding to the e-waste problem.

    Any idea how long the sale price will last? It seems like a good solution for people looking for a plug-and-play way to get started. For the more hacker and/or budget-conscious user you, another options is to buy simple devboards for around $10, plug them in to existing hardware (like an old RPi), and have them act as a radio co-processor. The openthread getting started guide gives some examples.

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