In different previous post, I explained what is SigFox technology (a radio-communication system made for Internet Of Things, allowing a sensor to communicate with servers on Internet at an affordable price) and how to send data from a sensor to the SigFox backend.
This new post is explaining how to configure this back-end to get the sensor data loaded in your system and create your own application.
As described in a previous post, TelecomDesign chip can be customized to add your own application built-in the chip and made a really affordable IoT platform. This blog post is describing the first step to start building it. Read Next for details.
I already wrote some stuff about Sigfox here, so may know that it is a really promising French technology IoT oriented. So I have a project to connect a Raspberry Pi and arduino system on a such peripheral. The use of this technology is quite easy as it works like a modem, based on AT command transfered over a 9600bps serial line. The main issue is that the chip is really CMS and hard to hack at home easily… by the way, as you see, a poor soldering makes it working for the test purpose.
As much as I have test, I can say that using this device to communicate with an Arduino or a PI is really easy ! code can be written in less than a minute ; compared to what you have to do to make wifi / Ethernet / GSM working in a stable way, this is incredibly easier ! You can also use the device as an autonomous sensor for temperature and contact switch of your choice for an affordable price. In my point of view one thing is missing : you do not really know the signal quality and if you have a good connection or not with sigfox network. [update] The RSSI is indicated in the SigFox Api on the backend side for each of the received messages [/update] . Meaning you must receive the first one to know if the location is covered or not. This can be a problem to deliver a product and get an easy support to your consumer. The other limit of the technology, as much as I know is that you can transmit data but not receive some from the SigFox network [update] The ability for the device to receive messages will be soon added with limitation, but it will [/update]. In many case it is enough but sometime you like to respond to a specific value received. Read next to get details on how to use it …
SigFox is a French radio frequency technology allowing a really low cost data transfer from Machine to Machine. Compared to GSM, this solution have some great advantages : it costs only 10-16€ per year and the energy consumption is about 1000 time less. For sure there is some constraint and the main one is the quantity of information you can transmit. In fact you have a limit of 150 sent messages / days with a length of 12Bytes. It’s not big but is it enough for a lot of IoT and M2M applications.
This technology works as a modem you can connect to any platform like Arduino, RaspberryPi. The chips are provided by TelecomDesign from a cost about 15€. The starter kit is about 150€ here.
The great advantage of this technology, in a operator point of view is the low density of the architecture where you need only 1000 antennas to cover a territory like France. As a consequence, at this time, already 90% of the country is covered by this technology.