 All right, this week's IonMPI is Sorcombe and Ada, what is the new product of the week Okay. Introduced by you. Yeah, so we're back doing the weekly IonMPIs to last week. This one we're back to doing just one, but I really like this one. This is from Sorcombe and I actually was going to show, like they have a new IOT service but actually maybe I might do that in a couple of weeks because I actually really just liked this Onyx USB cellular dongle, which is from Sorcombe and it's actually kind of a cooperation between Sorcombe and Quectel because inside is a Quectel cellular modem, but they made this really nice little dongle. It's like really beautifully designed. It's got this like cool, like angular design. This is what it looks like. You can kind of see on the back there's this cellular module and on the top there's a couple of components, power supply, SIM card holder. It's actually not like technically that complicated because the modules do come with USB interfacing so there's no microcontroller. You're actually connecting like directly to the cellular module, but that said, like it's in a really nice case. It's got the SIM holder. It's got little antenna add-ons and it's got a USB plug that just like thunks right into your board. So this is the cellular module inside. It's the Quectel LTE-EG25. Again, like, you know, for basically the price of the module, you can now get it like with the power supply, SIM card holder, everything altogether, ready to go. It's LTE-CAT4 so it can do like pretty fast upload and download. You'll have to have a SIM card that of course has that kind of high speed internet connectivity. It's also good for IoT projects because it's got worldwide LTE, UMTS, HSPA, and it's still got GSMGPR edge coverage. So you've got like, you know, it isn't got like GSM2, 2G, 3G, 4G and LTE. So it's got like very, very wide coverage worldwide and it looks like it's also, it doesn't necessarily, this does not have the GNSS receiver, I don't believe, but you know, maybe they'll make a version that does, but again, it can go very, very fast, but it's also very inexpensive. And what I thought was interesting about this and what I really liked is like, you know, even the advertising photo for it says like, hey, you know, you just plug this into your single board computer and now, you know, it's trying to integrate cellular into a board as a real pain. You can do everything over USB and just use like a USB modem driver. Now you have a fully cellular connected IoT device and it's like no soldering, no design. You just plug it in and go. So I actually got this set up and working on my computer in like 15 minutes or less. It was really easy. So when I bought it, it actually came with, I also got the SORCOM SIM card, which I think is a global SIM card. Think about, you know, how many messages and how many megabytes. I think it's actually IoT based, so it's not like for data streaming video. It's for like setting data MQTT. You register on SORCOM's website. You do have to add a credit card. So you do that once you've registered. You know, you can now activate it within your console and there's this whole control console. What I thought was interesting in addition to this is that there's also, for everything that they do, you know, there's a web interface, but they also provide a back-end CLI interface. So if you're using this to like deploy, you know, 5,000, you know, whatever, soda can, dispenser, monitoring systems, scooters, you know, digital signage, whatever, and you and you want to manage them remotely. You don't have to use the console. You can actually automate everything using their CLI. And it's kind of something I noticed is that there's there's always an easy way to do it, like using their web interface. And there was also an advanced way to use it that was more powerful using scriptable tools. They do have multiple different dongles. The only one I, you know, used is the Onyx LTE dongle. One thing I liked is that they have the device manual, which I'll talk about in a bit. So, you know, the cellular modules are not just modems. They actually have a lot of stuff built into them, like an MQTT peripheral or an FTP, TCP API or HTTPS. So you don't even need to have the stack on the device. You can actually use the stack on the cellular module, not on the computer. And they have all that available, which is really nice. You don't have to sign an NDA, which I can really dug. And then for Linux, it shows up as a comport. It is a composite CDC. So on Windows, you have to install a driver. I'm on Windows. Yeah, installed it. It worked. And then it shows up as a modem. And then you get the three comports. Like, again, I don't believe this one. I don't think it has the NMEA, the GPS. It still shows up, but there's no data that comes out of it. And you've got the AT port, which is the control port. And data, I think DM is for the data port. And then it also shows up as a plain like USB modem. And then what's nice is all I had to do is, like, turn on roaming. And then I just selected the sortcom. And I unplugged Wi-Fi. And I disconnected ethernet. And I was on the internet through the cellular connection. So it's that easy. It's really fast, very simple. And so especially with silicon shortages, if it's like you want to add cellular connectivity, but it's impossible to get cellular modules, or they're constantly changing, or whatever, don't make a custom board. You may not even need an M3 module. Just plug in USB. It just works, and it was plenty fast. For Linux, what I thought was really nice is they have a shell script that is for Raspberry Pi. And you basically, I think they borrowed this like we did from Pimeroni, where it's like setting up something takes so many steps. And it's easier just to give somebody a shell script. Tell them to pseudo-curl it and run it. And it'll install everything. And then you basically have an interface that is basically internet connectivity. But again, through the cellular module, it's like the easiest, fastest, no-solder way to add to single-board computers. And if you have a Windows-writing single-board computer, you use the other driver. Linux single-board computer, you use this. Either way, now you've got world-wide connectivity. And I did check the AT port. And you can absolutely use it. And yes, that's the ICCID. But don't worry, I'm going to cut it in half in a moment anyways because I'm done using it. And you can use this with, they had a really nice tutorial that's linked, that'll be linked from the blog post, where you can use it as a low-level modem. So you have as a modem, and then you connect to the internet service. And then you have to have all of your TCP-IP packets go through it. Or what you can do is you can use the built-in, say, MQTT client. And this uses a lot less data because you don't have this overhead. So it's going to be a little faster, a little less power. But you have to script each command in. So for example, they have their own MQTT demo here. Sorry, MQTT broker on beam.sorecom.io, 183, which is MQTT port. And then you can connect to it, log in, and also automate it with PySerial. So this is a shell script, sorry, a Python script. It uses PySerial. You can see it connects to the serial port, TTY USB2, which is created when you plug it in. And it just sends in the raw data to publish to a topic. And then you can then use their web interface to the MQTT broker to see the data was published. So again, if you don't want to use a full TCP-IP stack because you want to save power or you want to save bandwidth, there's nothing lighter than just sending the raw commands. I mean, this is like it'll just do the bare minimum to send the data, connect, send the data, and disconnect right afterwards. Available on Digikey, as in you can really actually get it, that's why this is MPI. They actually have a lot in stock. And the price is very good. It's like under $100, I think. And then we want to go to the overhead. So this is what it looks like. It's got this nice design. There's two antenna ports. You can connect to if you want to have external antenna. And then this is the SIM card that goes in there. So you can use any SIM card. They sell some cards, indicator modem, and then yeah, this is just USB. So it's a very convenient, easy way. And so many electronic projects now are just a Raspberry Pi. You can attach whatever custom hardware or controller you want. And then with internet connectivity, so complicated, you want something that has a full Linux TCP-IP stack to handle connectivity for you and reconnection and your certificates and whatever and remote control. You just plug in this and now it's cellular connected. OK. And I think in the blog post, we'll embed that three minute long video so folks can watch. There's a really good comprehensive vision. It's a good video. But yeah, we'll have it on the blog post because it's three minutes long and I've rambled enough. Yeah, that's all good. And that's on MPI. On MPI.