$99 RAK7246 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway Features Raspberry Pi Zero W SBC

Raspberry Pi Zero LoRaWAN Gateway

Outdoor LoRaWAN gateways meant to be deployed in the field usually cost several hundred dollars, so companies also offer cheaper gateways for indoor use that can be used by developers. RAKWireless offers this type of gateway with products such as Pilot Gateway Pro RAK7243 based on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ board, or RAK7244 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway featuring the more recent Raspberry Pi 4 board and sold for $212 and up with price depending on options such as cellular connectivity. The company has now worked on providing much cheaper indoor/developer gateways with their RAK7246 and RAK7246G LoRAWAN developer gateways with the latter adding GPS. RAK7246 is available. RAK7246 key features and specifications: SBC – Raspberry Pi Zero W board with Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor @ 1GHz, 512MB RAM Storage – 16GB MicroSD card Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 via Cypress CYW43438 module found on RPi Zero W board […]

MikroTik wAP LoRa8/LoRa9 LoRa Gateway Kits Launched for $169

MikroTik wAP LoRa8 Kit

Last year, MikroTik announced they had worked on several LoRa products including R11e-LoRa8EU mini PCIe LoRaWAN Gateway/concentrator card, wAP LoRa8 kit (LoRa & WiFi gateway) with the mini PCIe card, as well as a 6.5 dBi Omni antenna kit to extend the range provided by the 2 dBi internal antenna. All three products are now available with R11e-LoRa8EU mini PCIe selling for $89, wAP LoRa8 kit going for $169, and the optional antenna kit adding $49. The company also introduced wAP LoRa9 kit with R11e-LoRa9 mini PCIe card geared towards markets (like the USA) using the 902-928 MHz frequency band and selling for the same price. MikroTik wAP LoRa8 kit (RBwAPR-2nD&R11e-LoRa8) specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Atheros QCA9531 MIPSBE (Big Endian) processor @ 650 MHz System Memory – 64 MB RAN Storage – 16 MB flash Connectivity Wired – 10/100M Fast Ethernet WLAN – 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 @ up […]

Semtech LoRa Asset Tracking Reference Kit Includes one LoRaWAN Gateway, Six Waterproof GPS Trackers

LoRa Asset Tracking Reference Kit Gateway

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 […]

Xiaomi Smart Multi-mode Gateway Supports Zigbee 3.0, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Mesh

Xiaomi Mijia Smart Multi-Mode Gateway

Xiaomi has introduced several inexpensive home automation products over the years, often under their Mijia brands with for example a WiFi to IR blaster, a Zigbee & WiFi smart home kit, a smart door lock, or a smart speaker among other products. Recently, the company has launched the Xiaomi Smart Multi-mode Gateway that supports Zigbee 3.0, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Mesh. Xiaomi Mijia Smart Multi-mode Gateway (model ZNDMWG03LM) key features and specifications: Connectivity ZigBee2.0 / ZigBee3.0 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 2×2 MIMO Bluetooth & Bluetooth Mesh Compatible with Apple Homekit Max range – 200 meters (Line-of-Sight) Up to 32 devices Power Supply – 5V/1A Dimensions – 90x25mm Temperature Range – -5℃-50℃ Humidity – 0%-95%RH, non-condensing The gateway can be controlled via Mi Home app running on  Android 5.0 or iOS 12.0 smartphones. It’s compatible with Apple Homekit, Xiaomi Mi AI speaker, and the earlier Zigbee/WiFi kit with Aqara gateway and Zigbee sensors […]

ESPRESSOBin ULTRA Gateway Features 5 Gigabit Ethernet Ports, WiFi 5, Supports 4G LTE Cellular Connectivity

ESPRESSOBin ULTRA

Marvell ESPRESSOBin networking board launched in 2016 for as little as $39  with an Armada 3700LP (88F3720) dual-core Arm Cortex A53 processor, up to 1GB RAM, three Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA, and a mPCIe slot for wireless connectivity. Globalscale Technologies is now back with ESPRESSOBin ULTRA with a similar base but more features, a metal enclosure, and a much higher price point. ESPRESSOBin ULTRA specifications: SoC – Marvell Armada 3720 dual-core Arm A53  processor clocked up to 1.2 GHz with packet accelerator System Memory – 1GB DDR4 (option up to 2GB) Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, 4Mbit SPI NOR flash, 1x M.2 2280 slot for SATA SSD Connectivity Switch – Marvell Topaz 6341 (88E6341) Networking Switch 1x GbE WAN with 30W POE 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports (LAN) 802.11ac Wi-Fi 5 2×2 MIMO module + Bluetooth 4.2 Optional 4G LTE cellular connectivity via mini PCIe and NanoSIM card slot USB – […]

Tasmota Open Source ESP8266 Firmware Now Supports Zigbee Connectivity

Tasmota Zigbee to WiFi Gateway Prototype

Sonoff-Tasmota is a popular open-source firmware designed to run on ESP8266 hardware for home automation projects. It was initially designed to run on devices from ITEAD Studio Sonoff family but now supports more products, boards, and modules from other brands such as Shelly, Wemos, Blitzwolf, and others. So the first news is that the project has recently been renamed from Sonoff-Tasmota to just Tasmota, and documentation has been moved from Github Wiki to Github.io. Tasmota Zigbee Support A piece of more important news is that Tasmota now supports Zigbee. More specifically, the Z2T (Zigbee to Tasmota) concept allows you to make your own Zigbee to WiFi bridge by combining Z-Stack-firmware on CC2530 and Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 / ESP82xx hardware. Basically all you need is ESP82xx hardware connected to a Texas Instruments C2530 based Zigbee device over a serial. Note that C2531 based device won’t work since they are connected […]

RAK7244 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway Combines Raspberry Pi 4 with LoRa HAT, Optional 4G LTE Connectivity

Raspberry Pi 4 LoRaWAN LTE Gateway

After launching RAK831 Lite LoRaWAN gateway based on Raspberry Pi 3 board in 2018, RAK Wireless introduced Pilot Gateway Pro RAK7243 gateway with the more recent Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC earlier this year. But with the launch of Raspberry Pi 4 last June, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ has become much harder to procure, so RAK has now launched an updated LoRa gateway featuring Raspberry Pi 4 SBC together with the company’s RAK2245 Pi Hat Edition LoRaWAN gateway concentrator module. RAK7244 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway specifications: SBC – Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 2GB RAM Connectivity LoRa RAK2245 Pi Hat LoRaWAN gateway concentrator module with 1x SX1301 baseband processor, 2x SX125x Tx/Rx front-ends LoRaWAN v1.0.2 support Support for 8 channels and spreading factors SF7 to SF12 Bands – 433MHz, 470MHz, 865MHz, 868MHz, 915MHz, 920MHz, 923MHz Tx Power: 27 dBm Max RX Sensitivity: -139dBm Cellular – Optional 4G LTE support via RAK2013 […]

esp32MX-E ESP32 Board Comes with Ethernet and USB-C Ports (Crowdfunding)

ESP32 Ethernet & USB-C Board

We’ve already covered several ESP32 boards with Ethernet including Olimex ESP32-GATEWAY and Silicognition wESP32, and I’ve just noticed Espressif also made its own with ESP32-Ethernet-Kit. Modtronix Engineering has another take with esp32MX-E board that beside Ethernet also exposes a USB-C port, a MicroSD card slot, and also adds an STM32F0 microcontroller acting as an I2C I/O expander. esp32MX-E specifications: Wireless Module ESP32 dual-core LX6 microprocessor at 160 or 240 MHz, 4 MB Flash, 520 KB SRAM Wi-Fi 4 802.11 b/g/n Bluetooth 4.2 BR/EDR & BLE Storage – MicroSD card slot USB – USB Type-C connector for programming, power, and Virtual COM port Expansion via 14-pin and 20-pin female headers 22x I/O pins of which 4 are inputs only. 4x 5 V tolerant I/O pins Not all I/Os are available when the SD Card is used Programmable pull-up and pull-down resistors on most inputs Secondary MCU – I²C I/O expander implemented […]