2 comments

  • rurban 1018 days ago
    I'm also a big fan of Quectel, but I prefer the BC66, with pure NB-IoT, no Linux, no PI, baremetal firmware. This thing runs 10 years on a battery. For meshes we did our own protocol, similar to Zigbee. You can control various optimizations much better.

    The faster BC660 with LTE is also nice if you can power it and need the transmission rates. But I trust NB-IoT more, which runs on the empty ex-3G frequencies. LTE is pretty loaded

    • bborud 1018 days ago
      The BG-95 M3 has NB-IoT and 2G in addition to LTE-M.

      The point of this gateway was mostly to have a platform for rapid prototyping and flexibility in applications where power consumption isn't a concern. And in many scenarios you can have a gateway that is plugged into the wall and need not run on batteries.

      It also provides a platform where the gateway is suitable to run more involved server software, to eliminate the need for separate server infrastructure.

      We've made a few low power gateways based on the nRF9160 from Nordic Semiconductor, but while these are really small and draw very little power, they are also very resource constrained. So you can't run server software on them.

  • Sune00 1019 days ago
    I like the power from the shield approach. The PI does not have a heavy duty power on board...