 This week's IonMPI, brought to you by DigiKey and Ada Fruit, is from Blues Wireless, Lady Ada. What is this week's IonMPI? Oh, okay. So this week's IonMPI is from Blues Wireless. They're kind of a, they're not super new, but they're a couple year old, I think cellular service and hardware company. You know, it's basically make IoT really easy. You know, right now they're focusing on cellular. And so I saw their note cards and note card carriers pop up on digiKey.com slash new. So check this out. So you know, they're two products, but we'll talk about the note cards first. So the note card is an M.2 key plug-in card. And each card kind of has everything you need to, you know, get going with the cellular system. As you can see, it's got UFL antenna connectors. It's got an embedded SIM with pre-provisioned AT&T network connectivity, voltage regulators and managers. There's an onboard Cortex-M4. There's ST safe. So there's like a key hard, hardened private key holding device for secure authentication. You'll need that if you want to connect to like AWS and stuff securely. And there's accelerometer and temperature sensor. So that's good for asset management. If you want something's been moved or the temperature's changed on the back, and I'll show these modules on the overhead later. There's a cellular module and there's different Quaktel modules on each side. And you know, basically when you purchase the card, you're purchasing service as well. That's sort of the deal here. Each one comes with a 10-year connectivity and 500 megabytes of data. Of course, you can purchase more data and more time. Everything is SSL and secured over the cellular network. And they have three different, well they actually have multiple networks but they support L-T-E-M, N-B-I-O-T or Cat1. And we'll talk about that in a bit why you might want one or the other. And the idea here is you just have four different cards. Each card has a slightly different amount of support. You plug it into your dev board or their dev board and then you connect to their cloud. You know, we direct the data from your device into AWS or onto your cloud app. Everything's done with JSON data. So I guess underneath you can do HTTP or you can do maybe SOAP, sorry, Co-App or MQTT. And 500 megabytes, which is what it comes with, it's not a lot of data if you have a data plan. But if you're transmitting temperature data or motion activity or GPS and stuff, 500 megabytes will last you quite a while. That said, you can always get more. I saw one really funny comment on YouTube. Somebody said, I want more data and somebody from Blue said how much and they said 501 megabytes. So yes, you can buy more megabytes. But the idea here is that when you get it, you don't have to do separate provisioning. It's a kind of pre-provisioned for you. And I saw something interesting because these are both PTCRB and you don't need to, you know, the end customer like you do with SIM cards because it's only IoT, it's not voice or SMS. It's only this NBIOT or CAT1M. You don't need to have identifying information about the end user. They can pre-provision it on the cellular network with AT&T, which is quite nice. It's one of the steps that's annoying about doing cellulars. You have to go and register and get, you know, a SIM card. So there's four different modules. And you can see here there's global, North America, narrowband, wideband. You know, which one you get, first off depends on the coverage and we'll talk about that, but also how much data you want to pass. So narrowband, of course, is going to be like NBIOTs is you can look at the bit rates. I don't know the top of my head, but you're going to get much lower bit rates with NBIOT versus LTE CAT1. LTE CAT1 can like transmit a fair amount of data, but you know, you might have to pay more and also you may not be able to get like global coverage. So you can see like the NBIOT, you know, module, there's one module that can run anywhere in the world using the Quectel, BG95M3, but there's no such thing as like a global module CAT1. LTE CAT1, you have to choose either it's going to be Europe, Middle East of Africa or North America. This is, you know, part of the cellular networks. If you've ever done stuff with cellular, you'll know that not every country has coverage for every type of network, especially since a lot of them are being shut down or being transitioned and those are all happening at different rates. So this is more information about the cellular service. It's AT&T underneath. So, you know, you'll have to, depending on where your product or device is going to be deployed, are you keeping it North America? Are you watching this from Europe? Are you in Australia? Are you in Japan? It will differ about, you know, what is the remote network that's being handed off to do the wireless network? I basically say like they're kind of focusing right now on North America. If you're outside North America, I'd probably contact them and say like, hey, you know, the majority of my customers or clients are in this country. What card do you recommend I do for this bit rate? And they'll probably be able to help you out. So I did, you know, want to say like, because some people say like, well, why LTE and why is it not 4G and why is it, you know, some of them do GPRS. This is the Verizon network maps because they have this kind of cute little clicky click thing. So this is not the AT&T map. This is just a demonstrative of the kind of stuff you'll want to look into. So LTE has like this coverage in North America and then if you click over to NBIOT, you'll see Canada isn't covered, but the United States is. There's, you know, NBIOT has been rolled out over the U.S. a lot more, but it's not like rolled out almost anywhere else in the world. Whereas GPRS and GSM you see is like non-existent in North America. And this is, we found it's true. Like T-Mobile still has some GPRS cell networks, but almost all that bandwidth has been transferred over to LTE networks. Everyone's been moving off of 2G. Except you'll see there, if you're in Mexico, you still have 2G. So again, you gotta research where are you going to use these modules to determine. And then, you know, again, looking over at Europe, again, this is the AT&T map. This is the Verizon map, not the AT&T map. But Verizon doesn't, it has GPRS and GSM. So you see all that yellow and orange, but there is no NBIOT. Or at least not, you know, not enough visible on this map. So eventually everything will have NBIOT support, but it's coming slowly. As LTE is rolling out. Okay, so the reason we talk about this is because one of the things that's really annoying about cellular, and I know this about cellular, is that networks are constantly being brought up and taken down. So, you know, 10 years ago we like launched a whole bunch of 2G modules. And then, you know, now they're like pretty much useless. And even 3G modules are starting to get sunsetted. So what I liked about the Luzuelos modules is they have this M2 plug-in module. You can get the connectors from Digi-Key for like under a dollar. We even have a great search about this, and you can see they have in stocks. You don't have to worry about silicon shortages. And then you plug in whatever module you need. So if you have a product that you're like, I have European customers, Japanese customers, Australian, you know, Northern African, Southern African, Mexican, Canadian, whatever, each one of them you can plug in the module that makes sense for that customer base. And if the networks change over time, because 2G will eventually get shut down worldwide, you can change it out pretty easily. It's even like user serviceable, like I, you know, and no one necessarily have like the end-to-end customer do it, but a technician with very little skill could go in, screwdriver, pop it out, put it back in. You can't put it in backwards. So I think that that's kind of the smartness that they're bringing here is the realization that these networks are going to constantly be updating and changing. They also have a lot of code examples. So do check out the GitHub. They've got like a scanning storage guide. They kind of promise within 30 minutes you'll get up and running. And with the note cards is the note carrier series. So there's four different note carriers, four different note cards and note carriers, mix and match, right? Whichever one fits into whichever. Here are two battery powered ones and developer ones. They also have, ooh, it's a feather one. That's quite nice. Thank you. There's a feather carrier and there's a Raspberry Pi hat carrier. I also like that they have an iSquad C connector on there and it's, I think, Grove compatible. But we have a Grove 2 Stemma and quick adapter cable. So if you want to use our sensors with this to add humidity sensing, for example, you can do that best of all. All of these things are in stock. And did you see, yes, all of them are in stock, which is pretty amazing considering it uses both a silo module and an STM chip. Two things which are extremely hard to get nowadays, but they were able to get some inventory and you can buy these. Right now they're actually in stock. We have the short URL and the, did you key search there, but you can search for lose wireless. And do you want to show it off? And then we're going to play a video. The video is about three minutes long. That's a good video. So yeah, it's worth it. Okay, so let's go. So let's show it on the overhead. So I'll say I didn't get the feather carrier. I should probably should have, but I didn't realize. Collect them all. Yeah, I was not paying attention. So this is the carrier module, the per typing. And then this is the module and this is what one of them looks like. So this one, I think this is the NBIOT global, I think NBGL is probably what it means. And then this is the module on the back and you can see this, oh, I screwed this on. And then I forgot to bring a Allen wrench, hold on. Do you have it on the whiteboard at home? I know. Hold on. This is what we call dead air in the base. No, no, I can unscrew it by hand. It's just a... Leadiata has a Allen wrench shaped nail. Yes, so you basically can easily disconnect the UFLs and then plug in the module you want. And then these modules are what you would use in your end product as well. So this is really great for prototyping as you get the exact same hardware that you'd use in your final design. And I like it's got battery, it's got solar, it's got all the antennas. And even though you might want larger antennas, you can always connect them over UFL. They do have some simple built-in ones so you can get started immediately. And then USB for quick commands and headers for plugging in other sensors. So very nice. Oh, and then I forgot to mention these also have GPS GNSS support as well. It's quite common. You can also do location based off of cellular triangulation but GPS is of course gonna get you better precision and accuracy. Okay, and we're gonna play the video. It's really good. We'll see you on the other side. Take it away. Ion MPI and then we're gonna bounce into the next segment after that. Cellular is the most ubiquitous, stable and secure method for adding connectivity to devices. For developers, it's also the most expensive and complex. Cellular modems still use communication patterns from the dial-up days. Dev kits try to abstract away those old patterns but saddle you with narrow guardrails by dictating the MCU, RTOS, language and IDE that you have to use. And when it comes to cost, most cellular IoT devices include monthly fees and data plans that you are responsible for regardless of whether or not the device is even in use. At Blues Wireless, we aim to change that and make wireless IoT as developer friendly and accessible as Wi-Fi. And it starts with the note card. The note card is a device to cloud data pump that's ready to embed into new and existing applications. It includes a powerful cellular and GPS module and embedded SIM and an onboard secure element with keys and certificates added at the point of manufacture. The note card is a deceptively simple cellular IoT device with no fees that just works when you power it on. 10 years and 500 megs of data are included in the cost of the device and devices start at $49. You'll never get a monthly bill for cellular usage. Compared to other solutions, the note card is up to 10 times less expensive over the lifetime of the device. When it comes to sending and receiving data, the note card is a data pipe for your projects. Your MCU sends simple JSON requests and receives JSON responses. You don't need to issue AT commands to turn on the radio, send data, receive data, or anything. The powerful features of the note card are wrapped up in a JSON-based API that is simple and flexible. Finally, the note card works with any host device from powerful single board computers to 8-bit microcontrollers, meaning that you can get started with your favorite development board and programming language. It's an easy to program module without unnecessary guardrails. IoT solutions may start with sensors, actuators, and hardware, but they don't end there. In the Blue's wireless ecosystem, notehub.io is your secure conduit for device-to-cloud connectivity with the note card. Notehub.io facilitates the flow of JSON data from your MCU to your cloud application. With built-in integrations to major cloud providers, support for HTTP and MQTT endpoints, and a JSON-based data transformation capability, the note card and note hub create a JSON data pipe that allows you to forget about the complexities of getting device data to the cloud. With a note card and notehub.io, cellular IoT is finally developer-ready. See for yourself today at blues.io and start building your IoT solutions with no strings attached. You wanted to hold up something. I just wanted to say it was my mistake. There was an Allen wrench actually included in the packaging, which was underneath, and I didn't notice it. But you were resourceful. It was a good test. It was there all this time. And yeah. All right. Thank you. All right. I'm happy.