After presenting the UnaMKR Arduino devkit, Unabiz has made a new version of its maker kit supporting Sigfox Monarch and based on LiteOn module.
The UnaMKR mini is a breakboard solution for the LiteOn module and nothing more. You can easily make your own prototype system based on this board. The price sounds to be $25 to $30.
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We previously discovered the UnaMKR devkit. This devkit has two boards. The module board with the radio module and the sensors. It is the one I talked about in my previous post. The Arduino board is the second one. By programming this Arduino MKR Zero you can create custom program to use sensors and radio module to experiment Sigfox. The big advantage is a single board where ever you are located as it supports all the Sigfox zones.
During this second step, we are going to see how we can use the devkit to make a simple sensor measuring and reporting.
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Unabiz has recently released the first Sigfox Monarch certified devkit. It is based on a LiteOn WSG309S module. The LiteOn module contains a St-Microelectronics based solution including a BlueNRG / S2LP in it.
In addition, the module board also have different sensors: temperature, humidity, pressure, air quality, accelerometer, magnetometer, light sensor, magnetic switch (reed switch).
You are able to use the module board as a standalone circuit. You directly program the LiteOn module. Or you can use the standard AT interface of the module and connect an Arduino MKR Zero board to use it.
In this post, we are going to see how to use the kit to test Sigfox Monarch solution.
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Sigfox Monarch service is a free global service allowing to determine the zone where a device is located.
By zone location I mean RC (Radio Configuration zone). It basically defines the European Zone (RC1) or the North American Zone (RC2)…
Thank to this technology a world-wide device, having no GPS to get its location, is able to determine its radio configuration and the associated frequencies to use for transmissions.
This service is covering most of the airports and ports around the world to support the existing customer use-cases like Louis-Vuiton tracker and Safecube container tracking.
It would be great if this service could, in the future, be also used to broadcast/multicast information to devices. It could be used to get time from the network and later be also used to transport custom data to the group of devices. But currently it does not transport any data.
In this post I propose to detail the Monarch technology and then, in a second post to see how to use it with the first released devkit from Unabiz supporting Sigfox Monarch.
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