 DigiKey and Adafruit present this week's Ion MPI is from our friends of particle that's right our BFFs particle yeah we've known them for a very long time we were there when they were first kicked it off they used to be called spark and then the spark core and then the particle photon and this is a new part for them and this is really cool because they're like really good at making an excellent user experience so this week's Ion MPI is the particle tracker one and this is kind of a combination of all the stuff that they've been working on for quite a while this is an all-in-one cellular Bluetooth Wi-Fi GPS tracker that uses you know the particle code and system you know the deployment system they have for code and logging data so you know what what is an asset tracker used for well it's often you know used for you have a thing you want to know where that thing is and how it's doing so it could be as simple as I want to know where a truck or a train or a bus or a car is that's pretty common right you know you have GPS's and cars and maybe you want to know if you're a delivery company where that truck is and you know is it is it on the way or if it's lost you can also you know of course attach asset tracker to assets like if you have a very expensive thing that you're moving around and you want to track it making me you know make sure that it's not been damaged but you know as the trackers are used for other stuff as well for example you know common usage for you know cellular asset trackers is say you have a coke machine like there's you know down by the river there's the all those cook made soda machines right that are outside you don't want to have somebody have to go by there all the time and check are we out of spreader Dr. Pepper instead the asset tracker can say hey the cook machine at this latitude and longitude has plenty of Dr. Pepper but we're running dangerously low on Diet Coke so come on by and you know replace just that soda so you know that plus humidity and temperature sensing or maybe you want to know when your compressor has run from too many hours and sending a note to somebody know all sorts of like data analysis that you know you can't rely on Wi-Fi you want cellular data because cellular works anywhere in the country and in some cases you know in large parts of the world okay so the particle tracker one is this kind of durable weatherproof waterproof case it's got an IP rating which of course I don't have in front of me but probably IP67 I think something good like that and inside is this system module from particle that contains a Nordic NRI 52 840 that's their main processor chip it's a low-power chip it's a Cortex-M4 and it has a Bluetooth low-energy native they add to that a Quectel cellular module and LTE module that can do cat M1 as well you can also do 3G and 2G fallback if it needs to but LTE is kind of like the best thing because it's got a very wide range of deployment and then 3G and 2G you know basically you've covered you know pretty much anywhere that has cellular signal and it also has Wi-Fi with an onboard ESP32 S2 so you can use like SSID scanning techniques to do detection of location and of course a GPS model module from U blocks in the U M8U so what I really like about this is particle actually took the like they're like best of breed they took the best Wi-Fi module the best Bluetooth chip the best cellular modem the best GPS module and they stuck them all together and you know they glued it together with particles software so here's all the pieces inside so you've got you know all this hardware you've got some you know you've got the USB connectivity and you have debug ports and buttons if you need it if you want to get external hardware you see over there on the bottom left there's the extant expansion port where you can get you can power it so you can you know recharge the internal battery it's got CAN support it's got two digital pins it can also do UART and it's also got a GPIO and analog pin I think you know probably you can also do it's an NRI-52 at 40 which means you can also do I-squared C on these pins there's no hardware specific specificity about those 3 GPIO pins D8, D9 and A3 so you know you can do I-squared C you can do UART and digital analog you also do CAN bus so it's an easy way for you to add additional sensors to this device if you want to track that along with location which is what it's really good for I will note that the NFC antenna I don't think it's for reading NFC it's for NFC pairing that's part of the Nordic capability right this is the connector so there's like this IP67 connector again you can get a cable from them for a couple bucks and then attach external accessories a lot of people are gonna be like I want to add a humidity sensor this is how you do it you connect it through the power and IO connector the M8 this is the the tracker one is actually you know it's a product but it's also a demonstration board it's a reference design that you can use and then adapt as necessary and it's open source because our friends at Particle they're really into open source so check out Particle IoT and GitHub and they have Eagle files that you can use and re-spin it's I think a four-layer board you can re-spin this board to adapt it however you want you can use the same enclosure customizing closure but this way you know that you're gonna have the pinouts and power supply and everything all good to go so you know grab it I downloaded the Eagle CAD files I verified it you can see that the blue dots going down the the back the blue the the back spot that's the system on board module that's the module that they have that you solder on to a board I'll show it a picture of it shortly and that's what contains the main core processor and the cellular module and the SIM the SIM card is on board as well so I got one of these it was really easy I just logged in I told it hey you know I've got the tracker one I clicked on that it said what's your serial number I type the serial number and then it was like okay I know who you are I know what it is you know you do have to pay for SIM service that's normal it's a cellular device like any cellular device you have to you know register them to sell your networking you have to pay monthly fee the monthly fee is seven bucks a month which is a really good deal and you get 25 25 megabytes per month which is plenty for location tracking like you're not downloading the movie here you're just sending like strings are you know 40-50 bytes along with your latitude and longitude and maybe the temperature and humidity you then have your SIM card and you can like track your SIM card and you know check the location of this device and so you know as is it works as like a basic tracker like you can just you don't do anything I'll just tell you where it is it'll it'll get the GPS data and send it over cellular so you know where your device is however the thing that's really powerful about it is the particle IDE and it's something that they've been working on for 10 years like I've used this for so long and even had an example code from like seven years ago still on it from my account but what what you can do is you can write code and then deploy it over cellular to your device and update its capabilities and do so in a secure and trustworthy manner and this is the really hard part how do you upload code without worrying about breaking it without worrying about what if you upload the wrong code and something goes amiss they have like you know real-time operating system that manages it if something goes wrong it'll it'll go back into you know over the air mode you can we upload your code it's a very smart the particle system and they've been doing it for so long with Wi-Fi that they've really like nailed the details because it's the details of doing over the air that's like really challenging you know what if the cellular protection goes out in the middle of an update you have to partition your flash and verify it and you CRCs and on and on and on and this is stuff that I don't want to do but they want to do it they're good at it so you can just write code and through their IDE and deploy it directly to your device which is pretty nifty and that's how you would access those external digital pins or the CAN bus or analog inputs or PWM outputs so the deal is this is actually really cheap so you know if you were trying to build one of these you wouldn't be able to do it for the same price because you gain the Wi-Fi and cellular and Bluetooth and battery and enclosure you know and antennas and all that stuff together I actually even this is like a reference design if you are going to make something that has this kind of capability I would recommend just getting one of these and you just use that cable and plug it into whatever it is that you want to cellularize and like this is done right it's got all the systems in place it's got like all of the the security management the cellular system the ESAM everything's already done for you so you don't have to worry about that really really hard part because you can get a low-cost cellular tracker but they're not very reliable it's that that reliability and consistency is what you're going to find becomes quickly a problem especially that code deployment it's extremely hard to do well so you know any kind of asset tracking really just like grab one of these and just use it and then work on the other part of your hardware and design that you need to do don't don't like spend your time dealing with cellular modules it's like believe me it's not fun like you want somebody to just give you something that just sends data to their service and the data is there it's not it's not cool to be digging through you know pages of AT commands to figure out you know how to set up your SSL connection booted that yay to the tracker one so there's two versions there's the American one there's AT&T and then there's the Vodafone which is Europe Middle East and Asia so you'd have to watch out for that for the LTE connectivity there is not 2G I think it will work worldwide but like 2G doesn't really work in the US so pick the one where your device will be the most likely to be it'll still work in Europe if your SIM card is global but you're not going to get LTE connectivity you'll you'll end up going down to 2G connectivity for that which is it's not as good and then once you finish your design let's see you can go to the image is go here once you finish your design you can pick up the tracker SOM eval kit like let's say you are bonkers and you're like no no no I really need to make my own tracking cellular system you can then pick up the SOM eval kit which has a lot more pins broken out and it's like more for developers and then you can develop with that little module in the center and then you can buy that in bulk you know this is the same thing that's basically used in you know like every e scooter you know to keep track of where it is over the cellular network so that you know it's designed for mass deployment fleets of products so for that you'd want to get the little system on a module board but if you're just making like a hundred or less just get the tracker really it's a better deal you're not going to be able to make it any cheaper and available on digikey that's part of what this is iron MPI all the new products that you want and motorcycle Lee on digikey and we have this device right I did I have an insight I'd show it off so this is what it looks like I removed the the waterproofing the weatherproofing so this is the board and it has status of course right now it's like hi I'm indoors I can't see GPS and I can't see the cloud so that's normal it's it's not very happy with me and when you open it up you can see there's a two amp hour battery it's a 3.7 level battery you can of course replace it with a bigger battery if you'd like it's got a nice big GPS antenna and look at the detail they put the weatherproofing they like epoxy around it I think this is the Wi-Fi module and then behind it I couldn't remove it because it's actually like epoxied in but behind this or maybe I could have been I didn't but behind this is this system on a module with the Wi-Fi with the cellular and Bluetooth so you can see here this is really nicely weatherproofed so you're using this connector here which looks like that it plugs right into the board and you can charge the battery through it and connect to it and then there's also a reset and bootload mode button so if you are debugging your setup there's a JTAC connector as well as a eSIM contact this is you know it's not too hard to open I opened it like you know it's using a couple screws and so yeah this tracker so it's gonna be handy you know Phil I won't probably use this for something you know you just turn on it connects the cellular network of course you can pause it when you're not using it and then turn it into an instant tracker and it's like super durable like this can you can I can throw this it'll be fine drop it dunk it in water we have a one minute long video and of course don't forget you can get on digikey for numbers there and then the short URL is there