The blog is written by our tech-team with Andreas Schmidt, CTO of ThingForward. He and his crew are always happy to “talk tech” with you. If you have any questions or comments please get in touch.
After looking into some of the details of NBIoT modules an LTE Cat NB as a technology itself, it’s now about time to get started with programming Narrowband Modules such as the BC68/BC95 from Quectel or uBlox’ SARA N410. Looking at the spec sheets of these modules can be a bit overwhelming, so what’s really necessary to connect an IoT device to a backend service? In this series we’re showing how to get started!
IT and embedded is a core part of modern industrial plants and facilities as microcontrollers and processors are able to control a large portion of manufacturing processes. Industrial IoT - or short IIoT - is the term describing the industrial subset of the Internet of Thing. Many solutions have been around for years to measure and monitor various aspects of manufacturing processes. What’s new for industrial companies is that data and control is not only done locally any more, but also from remote locations such as on-premise data centers or services from cloud providers.
In this post, we’re taken a closer look at boards and modules which are suitable for applications in an industrial setting and we’re trying to give pro’s and con’s for a number of applications.
For the past four month, we’ve been taking a deeper look into Narrowband as a mobile/M2M technology, some of the modules currently available and its applications in general. From the perspective of boards and modules, we’re really excited about Arduino’s offering of their new MKR 1500, a small but powerful board combining a 32bit Cortex M0+ MCU and an radio module for LTE Narrowband and LTE-Cat M. So we’re giving it an intense test-drive and let you know about the details of programming it, starting with this very blogpost and upcoming ones.
As long as we are dealing with NB-IoT, we considered of being more specific about real life examples using our Grove connector and narrowband protocol. Today we will be programming by using an MCU from Adafruit, NB-IoT module, OLED screen and some sensors in order to show the capabilities of our new hardware on a real life NB-IoT task. Please remind that, using these modules and sensors will give you a fresh start, then you can easily customise this setup with desired sensors, actuators or protocols.
There are several articles about this comparison between these three providers, but nearly all of them are focusing on big data, data storage, cloud functions and so on. Our key points comprise on IoT applications, device-cloud connections, device-cloud messaging, IoT security, sensor data storage and real-time data visualisation by using cloud functions. By reading this blogpost you will have solid reasons to choose one of them!
