They mention it is battery ready, small solar panels w/ battery charge controllers are very plentiful in the market today. If this is anything like competitors (Particle), you can put the devices in a very low power sleep state and have them wake up on event or on a time schedule to connect to LTE and send data.

We’re actually looking at a few energy harvesting ICs designed for solar. They usually charge up an onboard super capacitor that can be used for infrequent transmissions. If it works out, we might add it into a future version of the board, or as an add on board

Yep! GPS is already built in

Not yet, but next week we should be getting a batch of PCBs with better tuned antennas. Fingers crossed if the performance is good, we will send them out to test in different regions.

If you have an nRF9151-DK though, we could provide a firmware image and SIM for you to try it out. Once you flash your board, you can use it with the platform just like I did in the video

Let me know if you’re up for trying it!

We haven’t tried SQL specific models actually. That’s quite a good idea. Will try it out.

Yeah it mostly seems to be inconsistent at generating the SQL queries themselves. I guess my question was if this is even a good way to do it in the first place, or if we’re better off trying to analyse the data in a different way

The way the scripting engine is designed is such that it’s not really a problem to iterate in the field. If your code has an error, simply adjust and restart the script. Sure if you have the device hooked up to motors which could break things then of course you might want to do that in a controlled environment, but for applications like sensing that’s seldom a problem. The benefit you gain here is a very fast iteration cycle where you can easily test against real conditions, rather than in a lab where it might be hard to validate things. No need for heavy firmware testing, rolling out OTA updates, or worrying about bricking devices

In general I agree with you for complex projects, but these are typically where you can afford to have 2-3 engineers spend a year developing a specialised solution. Building infrastructure to safely roll out updates, managing data plans, handling compromised devices. All of this becomes a massive amount of work before you’re actually solving a problem for your business

The target audience isn’t necessarily engineering companies, but rather those that might have a few tech generalists. Their goal simply being to add some kind of sensing that might transform their product or service

It’s a massive rabbit hole! Thankfully LTE Cat-M1 that we use is much simpler than full blown LTE, but even still, the most iteration we’ve had to do is around the antenna system. Huge number of frequencies and bandwidths to support and much of the information is quite difficult to track down. Thankfully with the help of the SoC maker, antenna maker and SIM provider, we’ve just about managed to figure it all out

How is it better than having any phone + a backpack solar charger?

If you are looking for a doomsday scenario then LTE isn’t the way to go, handheld radios is the way to go.

In virtually any large scale disaster scenario cell networks are one of the first things to go, they get overwhelmed and if there is a power loss then cell towers go down.

Completely understand. This is really good feedback. I can start off by saying that there will absolutely be a free tier within the platform where you can buy a board and that’ll include some amount of data allowance per month. It’ll also include some amount of AI usage too (even if that’s not so relevant for your application)

We’re modelling the hardware pricing such that the cost of the AI isn’t baked into the board cost. I understand that for some users, they might not necessarily need these features and it makes no sense for them to have to pay for it.

I’m expecting that we can have the boards competitively priced around the ~$70 mark, but often the distributors will try to price it in line with similar products they carry. I didn’t want to mention it in the video as we’re still negotiating this with them.

Going up from there, the subscription pricing will be split into several tiers that allow for higher data usage, AI usage and the ability to connect higher numbers of boards to one deployment.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that you’d like the data forwarding as a base feature. Our initial thoughts around that was to fulfil the requirement for companies who need to own their data. Ie we can’t store it for them. To be clear, you’ll still have access to the data via an API even in the free tier, and you’ll also be able to send data to devices via a REST API. It was just the live data forwarding from devices to your server that was intended to be limited to companies

It’s the nRF9151 from Nordic. We’ll include a detailed section on the SoC and a full schematic once the documentation is up

The platform as you said aims to abstract away a lot of these details (though they’ll still be available if needed). Each of the IO ports will be configurable as GPIO/Analog/SPI/I2C, etc. Since these are all accessed via the Lua API anyway, we expect folks to not have to dig through the SoC documentation in order to figure things out. All the relevant settings for each mode will be available through the API. But yes, if you need more info, then it’ll be available in the docs