For a few years now I have been experimenting with various IoT devices that I either designed myself, using wireless-SOCs like the ESP32, or using Particle IoT modules that were specifically designed to interact with the Particle cloud server. Therefore, I wasn't familiar with the IoT products made by Blues Wireless over the last 4 years, until I saw a recent press release describing a Blues Wireless IoT module using the LoRaWAN RF protocol for communication between an IoT device and a local gateway. LoRa is a much longer-range RF communication method than either the Bluetooth, BLE or WiFi methods that I had tried so far. I found LoRa communication interesting and while looking at the Blues Wireless Notecard LoRa module, I found that it was only one of a line of Notecards which can be used to make IoT devices- using RF communication methods such as WiFi, Cellular, WiFi+Cellular, and LoRa. Figure 1 is a photo of the Notecard LoRa
Blues Wireless were kind enough to send me a sample of the Notecard LoRa module along with everything else needed to test it out. In this column, I'll describe my findings, after having tested this module and the cloud server that Blues Wireless operates to support it and other IoT modules that they sell. Interestingly, while I was reviewing the Notecard LoRa, Blues introduced a new Notecard that is designed to communicate with a satellite constellation, administered by Skylo.
"DATA PUMPS"
Having consideration of the reader's time, there is one important distinction that all the Blues Notecards share, which I'll mention right off the top. All Notecards are described as "data pumps". What exactly does this mean?
The RF-enabled MCUs and SOCS that I have used in the past, for custom IoT devices in my home, were all complete units. That is, the same MCU that handled the RF communication protocol stack also executed the program that:
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