IoT Archives - CNXSoft - Embedded Systems News

February 14, 2019 - 1 Comment

The Things Industries Announces $69 Indoor Multi-Channel LoRaWAN Gateway

If you ever see a cheap LoRaWAN gateway, chances are that it is a single channel gateway such as Dragino LoRa gateways that can be purchased for as low as $56. Those will work for your private network, but if others people try to use your gateway, some LoRa nodes will fail to connect. So what you really need is a multi-channel gateway for instance to connect it to The Things Networks. That would be $200 (and up), thank you very much. The IoT can only succeed on a large scale if costs are low enough, so Things Industries decided to design, and has now unveiled a low cost indoor multi-channel LoRaWAN gateway. Meet The Things Indoor Gateway. The Things Indoor Gateway specifications: SoC – Espressif System ESP8266 WiSoC Wireless Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 via ESP8266 + PCB antenna LoRaWAN via Semtech 1308 chipset with Support for 868 MHz (EU) and 915 MHz (US) bands. AS bands coming later …

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February 7, 2019 - 5 Comments

Ivy5661 Bluetooth 5 + 802.11ac WiFi IoT Board Up for Pre-order for $35

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 …

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January 30, 2019January 31, 2019 - 26 Comments

MXCHIP EMW3060 WiFi IoT module sells for less than $2

Over the last few years, we’ve seen several Arm based WiFi IoT modules trying to compete with Tensilica based ESP8266 including Pine64 PADI IoT Stamp and Air602 WiFi IoT modules with similar functionalities and price (around $2) as the Espressif modules. I have not seen many projects with any of those Arm based wireless modules, likely because Espressif Systems software ecosystem is mature, and it’s hard to compete for new entrants. Nevertheless there’s a new Arm WiFi IoT module, not based on Cortex-M core, but instead, MXCHIP EMW3060 is equipped with an older ARM9 core, 256KB RAM, and 2MB flash, and sells for just $1.79 on Seeed Studio in single quantity. The price further drops to $1.55 per unit if you order 50 pieces or more. MXCHIP EMW3060 WiFi IoT module specifications: SoC ARM9 core clocked at 120 MHz System Memory – 256KB SRAM Storage – 2MB flash Connectivity – 2.4GHz radio, 802.11 b/g/n WiFI, HT/40, support Station, Soft AP, …

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January 29, 2019January 30, 2019 - 1 Comment

AAEON AIOT-IP6801IP68 IoT Gateway Handles Rough Environments

There are plenty of IoT gateways to play with, but if your gateway needs to operate in rough environments, like outdoors or on a boat, you’d need to find one that is water and dust proof event for your environment. AAEON AIOT-IP6801 IoT gateway should meet most people requirements with IP68 ingress protection rating, an Intel Apollo Lake processor, up to 4GB memory, 32GB eMMC flash, built-in support for Ethernet, WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0, as well as optional support for LoRa, 3G/4G LTE, and IQRF connectivity. AAEON AIOT-IP6801 IP68 IoT gateway specifications: SoC (one or the other) Intel Atom E3940 quad-core processor clocked at 1.6 GHz / 1.8 GHz (Turbo) with a 12 EU Intel HD Graphics 500; 9.5W TDP Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor clocked at 1.1 GHz / 2.4 GHz (Turbo) with a 12 EU Intel HD Graphics 500; 6W TDP Memory – 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 memory Storage – 32GB eMMC flash Display – HDMI Connectivity …

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January 18, 2019January 19, 2019 - 4 Comments

Cellular Forecasts for 2024 – 1.5 Billion 5G Subscriptions, 4 Billion Cellular IoT Devices

5G has yet to really take off, as it’s only available in a few cities, but a recent report publishes by Ericsson provides some forecasts for the future of 5G and cellular IoT connectivity, as well as interesting numbers of the current state of cellular networks. There are now 7.9 billion mobile subscriptions, more than humans, including 5.7 billion mobile broadband subscription, with Asia clearly dominating the field due to its much larger population. Asia also accounts for most of the recent growth in subscriptions, and interestingly people in Central and Eastern Europe (including Russia) especially appears to need more than one mobile subscription with 142% penetration, which means on average one person has 1.4 mobile subscriptions. There are more subscriptions than people in most of the continents/countries, but to a lesser extent, and India (87%) and Africa (82%) are the only exceptions. The chart above allows us to look at both the current trends and the future. We can …

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January 10, 2019 - No Comments

Mictrack MT825 is a Waterproof LTE Cat M1 & NB-IoT GPS Tracker

We’ve previously covered Mictrack MT600 4G LTE GPS tracker with support for various GPS software such as the open source OpenGTS and Traccar programs, as well as Android & iOS mobile apps. Since then the company released MT550 model with NB-IoT and LTE Cat M1 (eMTC) connectivity, as well as an OBD-II model that are currently sold for respectively $99 and $69 on Aliexpress. More recently a waterproof LTE IoT module called Mictrack MT825, which we’ll look into more details in this post. Mictrack MT825 key features and specifications: Cellular Connectivity LTE Cat M1 (eMTC) LTE FDD: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B8/B12/B13/B18/B19/B20/B26/B28 LTE TDD: B39 LTE Cat NB1 (NB-IoT) – LTE FDD: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B8/B12/B13/B18/B19/B20/B26/B28 2G – GSM: 850/900/1800/1900Mhz SIM Card interface – Nano SIM Internal LTE CAT M1 & NB-IoT antenna Location U-blox MAX-7 GPS chip GPS sensitivity – -162dBm Channel – 56 Positioning Accuracy – 10m Cold Start – 30s. Warm start – 15s Hot start – 1s Internal GPS antenna Sensor – 3D …

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January 2, 2019January 3, 2019 - 2 Comments

FOSDEM 2019 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where developers meet on the first week-end of February to discuss open source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2019 will take place on February 2 & 3, and the schedule has already been published with 671 speakers scheduled to speak in 711 events themselves sorted in 62 tracks. Like every year, I’ll create a virtual schedule based on some of the sessions most relevant to this blog in tracks such as open hardware, open media, RISC-V, and hardware enablement tracks. February 2 10:30 – 10:55 – VkRunner: a Vulkan shader test tool by Neil Roberts A presentation of VkRunner which is a tool to help test the compiler in your Vulkan driver using simple high-level scripts. Perhaps the largest part of developing a modern graphics driver revolves around getting the compiler to generate the correct code. In order to achieve this, extensive …

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