 All right, this week's IonMPI brought to you by, did you key, and any different is, Nordic. What is this week's IonMPI? I love Nordic Semiconductor. I love their chips. And so it's always great to be able to highlight their stuff. They don't have a lot of product releases, but when what they do release is of course really excellent quality. This one, honestly, it's not really new, but it's available. And that's also another important thing. I also like to do IonMPIs where you can get the thing. So this week's IonMPI is the NRF 9161 comes in three versions. This is their cellular module. So they're famous for, you know, they started with, you'll go to the next page, you can read it while I chit-chit-chatter, they started with the NRF 2401, famous 2.4 gigahertz meshable network chips, wireless chips that were so easy to use. And then they did the NRF 8001 Bluetooth low-energy and then they did the NRF 51, which had the integrated microcontroller. And that's where I think things start to really turn around, not turn around, but I think become very interesting. Because instead of just being a peripheral wireless module, the microcontroller is embedded inside of it. And so the NRF 51 started this idea of having a soft device where you have the microcontroller and the radio bonded together in a module or in a chip and, you know, you don't have to have a separate microcontroller and it's designed for low power and it's designed for being very inexpensive and very small because you don't have two things communicating. So that same idea, the NRF 51, 52 and NRF 53 series now, they took that same idea of let's not have a separate radio, let's have the radio and microcontroller together and they did the NRF 9161. So this is a LTM or NBIOT, so two cellular networks with 5G and GNSS, so GPS, you know, or GLONASS or Baidu or whatever satellite systems they support, all integrated together with, as you can see on the right, a 64 megahertz Cortex ARM Cortex M33, so it's a nice fast processor, 1 megabytes of flash, 256K of RAM plus trust zone, so this means you can run, you know, your Zephyr, RTOS or what have you on the board and do cellular and it's all very, very thin and very, very compact. So yes, as mentioned, like they've also, by the way, added Wi-Fi and hopefully that Wi-Fi chipset will make it into DigiKey's featured product soon when it's released, when it's hardware released we'll talk about it. You know, basically it's like the strength that they brought to Bluetooth or energy and the usability I think is very interesting that they're like, we're going to now bring this to cellular as well. Okay, so inside is, you know, it is a SIP, it's a system-in-package, it's not a chip but it's like a, you know, it's a very thin module that's chip-like, but inside you've got that standard Cortex M33 ARM chip and then you've also got the modem and the modem is what connects to the LTE GPS network. You, of course, need an external SIM, but what's nice is everything's integrated together, including either even the temperature compensated crystal and the PMIC, which means that you don't need a lot of external components and you get all the stuff with that Cortex M33 that you would expect, analog digital inputs, I2S support, PDM support, PWM, like 20 plus GPIO. So, you know, if you, you don't have to have like two separate chips, if you want to like get some sensor data in, process it and then send it over cellular or receive cellular commands, control some motors, you can do that all in one. So the modem is communicated to you with AT commands, although, you know, it's nice that you don't have to port the AT command parser on your own. It's, you know, they give you software support for it, but you know, like any cellular module, you do communicate it with AT command sets to tell it what to do and, you know, I didn't go through the entire AT command set, but it's got all the things that you expect connecting, disconnecting. There's a socket data interface that's separate than the command interface, which is kind of nice. It's only for data, NBIOT and LTM, so it's not for making phone calls. It's for sending machine to machine data back and forth, you know, MQTT or HTTPS data, but it is a data system for cellular. That said, you know, a lot of things nowadays, we were talking about like when every scooter has a GPS plus cellular module in it, so it works anywhere in the world, when you get the eSIM or the SIM attached to it, you've got, you know, global or at least nationwide coverage that I've been worrying about Wi-Fi connectivity. The powerful thing that Nordic provides, because you're like, well, wait a minute, I can get cellular modules anywhere, you know, we've covered cellular modules on IMMPI and there are a lot of makers, but what I think is really powerful is Nordic always has really, really good SDKs and really, really good support. So, you know, people tend to use, when they use the NRF 52, they do like to use the Adafruit stack for it, for Arduino, but that said, the NRF Kect SDK has a lot of great examples and they have the Info Center will show you and they also have a really good support forum where you can talk to engineers, you need to talk to them in private, you can have like a, you know, an unpublic area if you need to get help with your design in or your firmware and they're very responsive. And then it's just, do I kind of think there's needs, like they have a whole system for how they do their SDK support and updates and they really keep it up to date. It's first class, believe me, I've used other billion-dollar company SDKs and they've been very painful. We've always really, really liked the Nordic SDK. The Info Center is also really good. I've, you know, not used it for the NRF 91, but I did use it a ton with the NRF 52 and they have a lot of questions, they have Arata and again, use this with their forums and their engineer support to get your project going and, you know, you pay a little bit more maybe for really good quality products but the support makes it worth it. I've never heard anyone say anything other than how good the Nordic SDK support is. And there's some videos of course, so check that out and we'll show a fun video at the end of this chat. So there's three variants for it. There's the SICA, which is what we're highlighting and that's the version that has LTM, NBIOT and GNSS. It's going to be the more expensive of them. I think it's like 20 is $24. But if you're willing to go to the, you know, LTM or NBIOT only versions and you don't need GPS support, you can save a couple of bucks. These are very inexpensive. I mean, it's basically the cost of what you would normally spend with, you know, a module, but you really get everything built in with it. And again, very few other external components are required. The modules also, what I thought was neat, is they all have, you know, 700 megahertz to something, three gigahertz, two point something gigahertz, bandwidth, which means that there is no, you know, one thing I've noticed with cellular modules is there's like the North America version and the Europe version and this is like Africa and this is South America and Australia and like it's very zoned based on the frequency. But because these are all wideband, you can use any of them in any zone that has the frequency support and they have certifications like various certifications, regulatory certifications like PTCRB, FCC, CE, et cetera. So you can kind of get kickstarted with your designs or checkout. You know, they have a certifications page where you can like look at it, make sure of course that the country that you're using it in, it's pre-certified for the band you wanna use. But of course you can use any band to just be aware of what it is so that when you go for your final product certification, you can kind of skip a couple steps because you'll be like it's pre-certified. There are some great dev kits for this. This is the, I mean, this is the massive NRF 9160 dev kit, the case sensor dev kit and Digikey. This one has, you know, the Arduino compatible headers. It's got everything in it, right? It's got like the built-in antennas. It's got battery monitoring. It's got the, looks like the FT223H, JTAG, whatever, the same slot. It's massive, but it's got like everything, everything, everything, so it's good if you're like, I need to have a dev kit for my original product design and I need to have everything exposed. So great for like hardware hacking and of course, I think it comes with the Seca. So then if you decide later you don't need NBIOT, you can then, the three versions are pin compatible to just use the version that has only LTM. My favorite dev kit just because of the name is the Thingy 91. You can tell that there's just marketing was like, okay, we're gonna call it the Thingy. And it's also an NRF 9160. You can see there's a SIM card holder. I think it also has an NRF 22840 on there as a co-processor. It's got sensors and stuff built in, but it's compact battery powered. So it's designed for like you wanna design a low power user experience that maybe if your hardware has overlap with the built in hardware on the Thingy, again, you can prototype with it, but it's much smaller. It comes in like a little rubber case with a hole so you can attach to something. So the video, the pizza project, you use a Thingy because it has the accelerometer, you know, humidity temperature sensor and the cellular all built in. And then of course, if you like feathers, there's also an Nordic NRF 9160 Seca feather, right? So this is, lets you use the, you can see how few components you need to get this running. I mean, you basically just attach an antenna to the outside for GPS and cellular. And then, you know, maybe you have a couple components on the beginning for battery charging and LDO, but you're pretty much ready to go out of the box. This is from Ictonus and it's available from, from also from Digikey, you can get to get the feather. This is something you can actually get. Thingy. That's what Digikey. That's right. They have a lot in stock, 25,000, last I checked. They also have this, this is a Seca, but there was also the Seca BA and the Seca AA, but they have all three versions, which I thought was amazing. They don't have the dev kits in right now, but I think they're going to get some more soon. But if you want to get a cellular module, this is one of the few cellular modules, especially one with the mic control, that's inexpensive and available. And we have a cool video that in order to put together, we're going to play just a little bit of it. Have you heard about this new startup, the NRF Pizza Delivery guys? No, what are they doing? Cellular IoT Pizza Delivery. They're running a prototype rounds now with Nordic Thingy 91. Oh, that's cool. What are they doing differently from other pizza delivery services? So they're taking a pizza delivery to a whole new level. Every pizza box has a Nordic Thingy 91 inside, and this has sensors on it, capable of measuring temperature, pressure, and acceleration, and much more. And this is transferred over to the Nordic NF90 160 SIP, which also has GPS. Then all of this data is transferred up to the NF Connect for cloud using the new low power cellular technologies, LTM and MB IoT. That sounds cool, but what are they actually using the sensor data for? Oh, they also have this app called NRF Pizza. And after you've ordered your pizza, you can see exactly where it is on the map and when it will arrive. It will also show you the temperature of the pizza and if it has been flipped or not. The app extracts all this data to the NRF Connect for cloud device API so that the app can get access to the GPS and sensor data directly. Nice. Yeah, and the best part is if the temperature gets too low or the pizza has flipped, you get it for free. Oh, sweet. That sounds like something that will really disrupt the pizza delivery market. My pizza's here. Gotta go. Yeah, see you.