Imagine a single board for all your LoRa developments. Small, powerful, affordable.
A board you can use for prototyping, but cheap enough to use in production as well.
That's what we had in mind when we developed the LoRaONE. Why reinvent the wheel every time?
If we could design a board that has all the features everyone would need to build LoRa devices, it would shorten the time to market for every next LoRa solution.
Just use our board, write your software in the Arduino IDE (or any other platform of choice), put it in a case and start selling. It couldn't be any easier.
We have now started the production of a small batch of boards and you can be one of the Beta Testers. Order it online now for just €100 (http://shop.sodaq.com/en/sodaq-loraone.html)) and we will ship it out on the 15th of March. But be quick, we will only have a limited number of boards available.
We started by including the core of our Autonomo; a proven 32 bits Arduino compatible platform with a solar charge controller that runs on a LiPo or permanent battery.
Next we added a GPS module. We chose the Ublox Eva 7M. It's not only very small, but with it's assisted GPS feature it can often get a fix in just 5 seconds.
We also included a low power Accelerometer/Magnetometer chip. This means we can keep the board in sleep until it moves or has a change in magnetic field. This is crucial for developing low power devices.
Say you want to develop a bicycle tracker. You would like know the position of the bike, but only when it has moved. So keep the device in deep sleep until you detect motion. If the motion continues for a while, the bicycle may have changed position so you only then switch on the GPS to get a new reading and send this new location over the LoRa network. This way you make most efficient use of you battery capacity by only using the GPS when really needed.
The Magnetometer extends the range of possibilities. You could now use the board to develop a parking sensor (if the device is buried in the tarmac/cement and a car is parked over it, this changes the magnetic field).
You can also mount it to a fence and use the compass direction to determine if the gate is open or not. The possibilities are endless, and no shields or additional sensors are required.
The board is so small (40x25 mm) you can fit it inside alsmost anything. To ease the development we have fitted two rows of headers so you can plug it on a breadboard. Why? Because it has 14 free I/O lines that you can use for your own purpose. Wether you want to build a weather station, control street lights or get a signal when you have received (snail) mail. It's all possible with the LoRaONE.
Here's an overview of the features:
Microcontroller
ATSAMD21G18, 32-Bit ARM Cortex M0+
Compatibility:
Arduino M0 compatible
Autonomo Compatible
Size:
40 x 25 mm
Operating Voltage:
3.3V
I/O Pins:
14, all can be used for digital and analog with PWM, UART, SPI and TWI (I2C)
Analog Output Pin:
10-bit DAC
External Interrupts:
Available on all pins
DC Current per I/O pin:
7 mA
Flash Memory:
256 KB
SRAM:
32KB
EEPROM:
Up to 16KB by emulation
Clock:
Speed48 MHz
Debug:
Serial Wire Interface
Power:
5V USB power and/or 3.7V LiPo battery
Charging:
Solar charge controller, up to 500mA charge current
LED:
RGB LED
LoRa:
Microchip RN2483 Module
GPS:
uBlox EVA 7M
Accelerometer/Magneto:
LSM303D
USB:
MicroUSB port