How to transfer pictures over Sigfox network ?

Yesterday in a communication around Securitas Direct deal a small phrase has waked up all the Sigfox community:

Announcing in a certain way the arrival of 600Bps support for Europe (this is already the North American standard speed) to support the picture transfer over the LPWAn network. That said, even at 600Bps it’s a bit complex to transfer a picture… let’s see what we can do with this:

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LoRaWan in US915 zone

I’m living in RCZ1 (EU868) area and our zone have some specific rules for using the free radio frequencies like duty-cycle to comply regulation I already shared in the linked post. I was little experienced with the US zone regulations. Thanks to a project made for a North American customer I started working on it and I’ve surprised of the differences and how it impacts the LoRaWan developments.

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Measure power consumption with Otii tool

A usual question you have when designing a device is the autonomy of your battery and the power consumption of your device. By the past I’ve tried different tools for this usage. Starting with USB sticks power consumption, only working for high consuming devices. They are low precision. Going to multimeter tools with USB connectivity precise but sampling at 3-5Hz only. During a certain time I’ve plan to make a solution on my own and finally I’ve found the OTII tool from QOITECH on the recommendation of friends from Sigfox community.

Here is my experience with that tool.

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No ! Sigfox is not removing duplicates

From 9-12 months ago, all the backend Sigfox user have this notice printed in the callback page:

Since, I hear many people saying the duplicates and signal related metadata will be removed from Sigfox.

This a WRONG ! Let see exactly why and what is replacing this feature ; how it impacts the way you build you integration with Sigfox backend.

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Battery selection for IoT design

When making an IoT project the battery choice is something really important. Batteries stands for autonomy, sizing, price and usage conditions.

There is no universal solution to power your device, the right battery really depends on your requirements. To find the right powering solution you need to consider a certain number of parameters. We will try in this post to list most of them. This post is not exhaustive: I’m not a battery expert. This post is based on my own experience and you may consider it as a starting point, not a solution.

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Battery technologies usually used for IoT compared

As it is a recurrent question to find the right battery for an IoT design, I decided to write a post about this topic. I’m not claiming to be an expert of this and I’ll not give insight on this. The purpose is to list the different technology existing with the main characteristics to be able to use the best fitting technologies quickly.

This post is presenting a table of the different battery’s technologies available with the main characteristics. These characteristics are global one regarding the technology. Each of the battery vendor can have specific specifications a bit different. You will need to take a look on datasheets details.

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First steps with LoRa Radio Node (Arduino)

The LoRa Radio Node is an AVR Arduino board with a RFM95 LoRa module. This all-in-one LoRa module allows to have a LoRaWan device for a reasonable price around 15€. You need to add a battery (like a LS14500 3,7V battery) on the battery holder for a 4€ extra cost to make it mobile. LiPo option are also available using the power connector. Even if the connectors are looking like grove, they are not compatible so you will have to make your own wiring to connect extensions.

This post is reviewing how to getting started with this board to fire your first LoRaWan frame over The Things Network.

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