 Hi, IonMPI. OK, IonMPI, we look at the new products every single week. You can see these on Digikey. Yes, there's a special edition from the desk lady. It was actually handy, because I'm going to show the demo. And maybe I'll show the Arduino code as well. So this week's IonMPI. Is this from Sequence? Well, here's the thing. Technically, it's actually from Microchip. But it's a partnership between Microchip and Sequence. And I really like their logo, which has that cool, like, can you cross every square in the dot using only three lines, or four lines, so there's a puzzle that you always get in grade school? Anyway, that's a solution. So this is the AVR IoT Cellular Mini, which is a new dev board from Microchip using an Avel AVR microcontroller, the AVR128. The cellular module is from Sequence, and the SIM card is from True Phone. So it's kind of like a big collaborative effort. But also, this is actually one of the nicest cellular dev boards I've seen. It was extremely easy to use, and the price is really good. So first up, the microcontroller that's included is the AVR128DB64. So this is an AVR. It's kind of like a very souped up at Mega328, if you're familiar with that chip, or a really, really souped up, AT Tiny. Has 128K of flash, and I think it has 16K of RAM. So it's kind of chunky. But it's an AVR, so a lot of the things that you expect, simple register access, not needing to synchronize between domains, all that stuff, it's a simplified microcontroller. And it's powerful. It's got a lot of timers, got ADCs. It's got all sorts of cool stuff built into it. And of course, it's got a ton of flash and a ton of RAM, which will come in handy if you're trying to connect to IoT devices. Next up, there is a cellular module. Like I mentioned, it's from Sequence. It's an LTE module. Apparently, there is forthcoming NB IoT support as well. So they make the module, microchip makes the chip. They combined forces, Voltron slash AVR IoT dev board. So this cellular module has an AT command set. It's what you use to actually connect to the internet to send and receive data using that true phone SIM. So here's what was really interesting is that this is a part of the Curiosity series of boards. And does this look familiar? Does this look like some sort of dev platform that maybe we helped popularize? It is. It's the Feather. It is Feather compatible, which is really cool, because I think this is microchip's first Feather, or at least this is the first one I've ever heard of. It's Feather compatible. It's got all the pins in the right location. It's a little long, but that's expected because it's got the cellular module. And it's only that, but it's got a StemAQT slash Quick port on the site. So it's got here's all the pinouts. And you can see there's built-in sensors. And there's battery charging and monitoring. And all that good stuff. There's a programming and debug system using a SAM-D21E, which acts as like programmer slash UR to USB converter slash mass storage driver. Kind of does everything. But the brains of the chip is in there. Oh, it's also got a crypto chip, the AT-ECC. Sorry, AT-68-ECC. I think I can't remember the exact port number. But it's the crypto chip that you use for if you want to connect to AWS and you want to have your certificate stored securely for bi-directional TLS authentication. So the cool thing about Feather is, and we've featured Feather boards. And I like to point out when people are part of an open standard as this open standard that we are totally cool with other people using is designed to make breadboard-friendly dev boards that have USB that have battery charging. So they're really good for IoT. And then you can add microcontroller accessories like OLEDs or motor controllers or what have you on top. And you can see here, we make 50 boards and about 100 Feather wings. And then the community has dozens and dozens of more. So what's nice about using Feather is that it will be very easy for people to, like if you want to add motor control, we've got a motor control Feather when you can just, as seen here, you can just pop on top. And the second thing that they did, which I really liked is they added a quick connector. SparkFun came up with a quick standard. They made a lot of quick boards. When we started to get interested in plug and play, we looked at and we're like, let's join in. STEMIQT is just a five-volt compatible version of that. You can use either. And we've got hundreds of boards with STEMIQT. We're STEMIQTifying all of our boards. All SparkFun sensors are quick and other companies are also making quick compatible stuff like Primaroni and Zio and, shoot, I can't remember. Prototyping, direct or something. Other companies are making them as well. So we're not the only ones. Again, it's an open standard. So the Feather standard is what lets you add like big things like inks or displays or motor controllers. And STEMIQT, quick is what lets you add little sensors and breakouts and other small devices over I squared C. Both are included. Okay, so what's really neat is when you, the hardware setup is really fast. You basically just connect, you pop the SIM card out, you plug it in, you attach the antenna and then you connect power. And what's neat is that there's this new paradigm which I'm really liking where when you plug in a dev board, it shows up as a disk drive and then it has files to let you know what to do. So the documentation is when you plug it in, it says click me and I'm like, okay. And what's also neat is like, there's pubkey text which I'll be honest, I actually look at, but I'm assuming that's the public key for the crypto chip on there. But I like this exposure of the information, like non-secret information or documentation as a disk drive because it makes it very easy for people to get started. And if you lose, you don't wanna lose some leaflet and you're like, I don't know what to do with this thing. So when you go to, when you click, click me, you go through a step-by-step process where first off you have to activate the SIM card. That's the first thing they do because it takes a couple of minutes and that's done by Truphone. And what's neat is first off, it's free for 90 days and then you get 150 megabytes and it works in almost every country in the world. From here it was AT&T, so it's whatever AT&T network that uses LTE. And I like that it was 90 days because I've seen some free SIM card plans that are 30 days and 30 days is not quite enough to maybe get your whole project off the ground but 90 days I thought was very generous. So this comes free with the SIM card that is in the kit. Next, another thing that I thought was neat is the, that SAMD21, that's that interface board that I mentioned, is also like this drag and drop hex lead programmer. So for example, they're like, hey, chances are the firmware's been updated since you bought this board. Click here to download the hex file. You download the hex file and then you just drag it onto that disk drive that appears when you plug in the board and it programs it. Again, like I'm really liking this paradigm where you don't need to like open up at Mail Studio. I love at Mail Studio, I've lived in it but like it's great when you don't have to use it because it's quite a beast. Okay, so next up what I thought was really neat and I even sent this to our Learn Dev team because I thought it was so cool is the documentation site that they've got is I believe it's like Bitbucket back-end edited but it's a very nice, easy to navigate, well-documented, lots of photos, lots of emojis and clips of code and references for how to use this board, how to install the IDE, how to install all the Dev packages, example code, there's even a project where you're like 3D prints like this cube and you can use that with the Kerasi Nano to show how to make it a full product prototype with it and most important, it's got dark mode, which is I think, you know, nobody like it. I think it's like, I can tell that the people who worked on this documentation site spent a lot of time. Yeah, this is very advanced. I mean, this is, I think, the expectation for people doing modern development. Yeah. So good work, Michael. Yeah, this is very cool. Yeah. There's actually some cool stuff. I don't even know that I got to add. Oh, no, I didn't. There's some other for, I mean, it's interesting, it's like, I like the board, but then I suddenly became like very enamored by this documentation site. That's okay. Anyways, on the documentation site, there's hardware and schematics and there's a data sheet for this product as well. The other thing that I thought was just really nifty is there's this built in live editor where you can write Arduino code and then you can compile it and when you click compile, it downloads the hex for you. So it's like spinning up some server in the background with Arduino CLI, compiling the code in the editor and it gives you the hex, which then you can again drag and drop onto the disk drive. So this is like really interesting and like it's a little bit like micro bit, but like I'm kind of impressed at how quick and easy this live editor was. So again, it's not unique to this product, but it's a very interesting thing that they have set up for this product. So you can write code without even installing the Arduino ID. That said, if you would like to do more advanced development, you can. They basically recommend using Arduino. The DX core by Spence Conde, who writes amazing Arduino cores that we've used, has a core for the DB series of AVRs. I downloaded it, installed it in Arduino and it took a few moments. You'll also need microchips, AVR IoT cellular Arduino library, which you install it manually and it comes with the library for interfacing with the LTE modem as well as the onboard sensors. It has a bunch of examples. The first example you would start with is this HDB client, which I basically just change it so it connects to World Time API and then just change it to New York. And because it's Arduino and because it's Arduino and because it has a STEMI QT connector on the side, I was like, well, let's take the example and really quickly update it so that when you ask for the time and date from this World API, it'll display it on an OLED. So let's take a break and we can actually go and look at the demo. So this is the demo board. I didn't solder the headers in, but it's got the feather headers. I just have it kicked to my computer. And then, again, this is something I usually can't do with debt boards because usually I have to use a special IDE. I have to install this and it's like it's not Arduino compatible because this was really like, it's purely Arduino compatible using a core that's very well written as I squirt C support. So I was just like, well, let's just just plug and play without any soldering at all. And so adding other sensors, hold on, this OLED is confusing it. Adding other sensors or capabilities like Trivial. Like if I was able to do this and like, I'm gonna put this down. Connectors on the wire one, not wire zero. But once I got that going, pretty much just worked. So it was, I was kind of surprised. Usually things don't just work, but it just goes to show you the power of having Arduino compatibility, feather compatibility and Stem EQT. It's like, so this is the code that I wrote. So yeah, I just updated it and you can see at the top. I just added the SSD 1306 library. And then at the bottom, I just had to print it out. And then when you connect to the COM port, there's this like logging output. It'll tell you that it's connected to cellular. Only takes like five, 10 seconds to connect to the cellular network. And then it can get data over HTTP for example. There's also an NTT example and an AWS example. But I thought it would just be easier to just do HTTP. I will say I couldn't quite figure out exactly how to do HTTPS. I'm sure it's supported because I saw, there's an HTTP configuration, but there's no example for HTTPS. So I would really like it. Microchip, you should please add an example for TLS SSL. I think it will be very helpful for people because most servers these days do not accept connections on port 80 anymore. And available on Digikey 96 in stock. As the time of this printing, as they say, by printing I mean sending photons at your eyeballs. But it's a good deal. So like the price, considering that you're getting a SIM card that's good for 90 days, you're getting an LTE modem, you're getting the antenna, you're getting the microcontroller, you're getting the example code and the cores all set up. This is kind of one of the lowest cost LTE slash NBIOT dev boards I've seen. And it's a dev kit and it's feather compatible. So I think if you were looking for a feather with LTE support, this is a really good example of one. And plus you get to try out, and then we'll try that sequence LTE module. So that could be kind of fun too. All right, that's IonMPI. IonMPI.