I just got them at home ! The new Sigfox module with a low cost approach based on the OnSemi AX-Sigfox-D chip is now ready and available for being delivered. With a price less than $3 per module for a quantity of 10 this module offer a low cost access to the Sigfox network.
In this post I’ll describe the first step with this module.
I have recently discovered the smartEverything prototyping board for Sigfox. This board was used during the SigFox maker tour and It is really nice for creating some prototypes and evaluate the technology.
The board is an Arduino board based on an Atmel SAM D21 MCU (Cortex M0) with 256KB of flash and 32K SRAM running @48Mhz
The most important part is concerning the sensors available on the card and this is clearly the best point about this board : you have a lot of them available : crypto authentication chip, BLE module, GPS, NFC, Accelerometer / gyroscope / magnetometer, Pressure / Humidity / Temperature sensor, proximity light / sensor, RGB Led, Led & push button. It can be powered by USB or external 2xAA batteries.
The board cost is about 106€ and can be found at RS. It is provided with a sigfox network access to the backend.
This post detail how to get start with the board
Last week in Clermont-Ferrand the Sigfox maker tour came to see us and demonstrate the Sigfox technology to the local community.
We had a great time with Nicolas, Anthony and Alexander from Sigfox and the other about 30 participants coming from a mix of large companies, startup, students, hackers and makers.
The day was organized in “Le Bivouac” a great place for a such event.
After making my kit on my own, I finally got the official Telecom Design TD1204 kit (thank you TD) There is no big issues to use it once you have the right entry point, but as I had some email exchange with support to be fully ready for using it, I’m prefer to share some words with you on what to do and how it works.
Basically, the TD kit is an EFM32 Tiny Gecko Starter kit (STK3300) with some little modifications. The EFM kit have two interesting functions : in own a Jlink JTAG/SWD programming and debugging interface and its EFM32 MCU can be use to monitor power consumption with precision.
TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS
New version of the Telecom design SDK has been released for TD1208 / TD1208R / TD1204 and now officially supporting TD1205.
This new version provide some bug fixes, like a crash after 21285 transmissions that could be after 212 days in case of full use… some I had in touch with could be interested… @pioupiou and also a bug that disable gpio interrupt after sigfox transmission (I experimented it !)
For the main evolution, this version is supporting FCC and TD1508 and improving sigfox transmissions.
From my experience, this version is also a good way to decrease the size of your binary files.
This post is about upgrading from a SDK 5 to SDK6 and the impact you can when recompiling your projects.
To install the SDK from scratch, just follow the well documented official post here.
Today Sigfox is releasing a really good document about antenna design. This pretty document can be found following this link (available on July 7th). This document from TI also contains really well detailed information about the alchemy of antennas and the different kind of product you can find. From Silicon Labs you also have an interesting development kit for 868 antennas with performance published in this application note.
This is to say antenna is one of the most important part of a 868 object, as for Sigfox as for LoRa where the problem is basically the same. I discussed with different sigfox object designed and every-time the antenna was a big project issue. Some has payed about 10-15k€ to get a custom optimized design.
I never experiment a custom design but I made test with various antennas and the purpose of this post will be to give you my feedback on the different solutions.
During last Devoxx in Paris, I made a talk about IoT and Sigfox with my friend Daniel. Here is the talk (in french).
Once you have found the great idea of the year and you want to start implementing your first prototype it is time to choose the right technology. Some would say you should not choose at this step and implement both at end but in my point of view it looks like and economical mistake to do this way. Prototype is to demonstrate and final product. It can request another technology, for sure. But in my point of view the best is to take the right one at the beginning. For most LoRa and Sigfox are both equivalent or for some others one is over the other one, best depends who you ask. In my point of view, if I consider my 2-3 years sigfox experience and my starting experience on LoRa with 1 year background research on it, there is no magic answer. Context of your idea is the keypoint then you have some technical elements to take into account to finalize your decision.
This post will try to illustrate where each of the technology is the best and give you some decision keypoints.