[HN Gopher] Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with...
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Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate
connectivity
Author : matthewsinclair
Score : 176 points
Date : 2021-08-03 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blues.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blues.io)
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| Related question, do any mobile (virtual/non-virtual) carriers
| other than Google allow for additional sim cards to be added to
| an account without monthly fee?
|
| Rather than IoT devices each coming with their own cellular
| service, it'd be lovely if users could attach cellular devices to
| their own plans. Alas, the pricing model for most carriers makes
| this sadly unrealistic.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| I was given one of these by their dev rel folks and I'm really
| impressed by it. Easy to use, and the interactive tutorial they
| have that uses the Web Serial API is really great. I haven't
| quite put it to production use so can't speak to that, but
| they've really nailed the developer experience.
| rozzie wrote:
| Honestly, our thanks to Google's WebSerial folks who helped us
| to deliver the experience. It's quite wonderful.
|
| http://dev.blues.io
| Reventlov wrote:
| So what network is it using ? What frequency ? What range ? What
| is the maximum size for messages ? Where is the coverage map ? Is
| it LoRa ? Sigfox ? It says cellular, so, LTE ? Something else ?
| Anyone has data on this ?
| ourcat wrote:
| https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-5...
| rozzie wrote:
| Just so there's no confusion, you linked to the "NOTE-WBEX"
| which is europe-only. If you're interested in countries
| covered, it's best to look at "NOTE-NBGL":
| https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-
| nbgl-5...
| brk wrote:
| Is this certified on any carrier networks? Is it intended to be a
| component of a final solution, or is it more of a reference
| design?
|
| This looks/feels like an uncertified reference design, which is
| OK, but I'm trying to gauge applicability to build a product on
| top of this beyond a hobbyist scenario.
| rozzie wrote:
| It's PTCRB-certified as an "End Product", so it doesn't require
| the customer's product to be further PTCRB-certified.
|
| It operates in 135+ countries.
|
| It's an embeddable component that is to be installed in product
| manufacturers' end products. It is not just a reference design.
|
| You can think of the "notecarriers", though, as OSS reference
| designs or accelerators. They're intended to make it quick to
| prototype and deploy pilots, before designing the m.2 connector
| into your own design.
| tudorw wrote:
| Nice :) The dollar pricing on the front page made me think
| this might be US only, thankfully not the case, this is a
| very exciting piece of the jigsaw :)
| __sy__ wrote:
| This is very interesting. I'll provide a hot take since Seam (YC
| S20, i.e. the company I work for) could be a target customer for
| this for our on-prem multi-protocol hub. There are a number of
| use-cases that need a cellular back-up connection.
|
| 1. The data cost of most cellular solutions out there does
| eliminate a number of interesting use-cases that just don't have
| the margins/unit-economics to swallow $10/mon of data cost. For
| Seam, we're currently looking at Twilio and Skywire. If this is
| in fact 10X cheaper, I'd want to dig into why. This may be an
| unpopular & contrarian opinion, but so far my take is that
| regular carrier networks are pretty good at what they do (network
| ops, real-estate placement...etc)[1]. Competing with them on
| pricing probably implies some important trade-offs.
|
| 2. The provisioning of a cellular modem is a bit of a PITA. AT
| commands can vary for each modem and makes the process a bit
| daunting. But if you're making a lot of units of your product
| like us, it's really not that big of a deal.
|
| 3. The PCI connector is interesting. I think the form factor is
| what makes it a non-option for Seam's Hub, mostly because it's
| not something we can easily plug into an existing custom PCBA.
| But starting with the hobbyist market, or low-scale production
| devices [2], is probably a good idea. They can later work their
| way toward modules the way most LTE modems are sort of sold
| today.
|
| [1] If i am wrong, please let me know. I am genuinely curious to
| know where areas of operation improvements could exist in the
| current U.S. carrier market.
|
| [2] This is the market that OTA as a service folks are targeting.
| It's much bigger than one would initially think. Example of
| companies in this space include Esper, Balena...etc
| rozzie wrote:
| There are no tricks to the Notecard's pricing. The
| 500MB/10-years of data is embedded within the hardware pricing,
| which is $49 for North America and $59 for 135+ countries.
|
| What's more, it's "permanent roaming" and you don't need to
| identify the end-user of the device. It can be used
| anonymously.
| __sy__ wrote:
| Welp, first, thank you for taking the time to respond here.
| My mom won't believe it when I tell her that THE Ray Ozzie
| responded to my random HN comment :)
|
| Second, could you comment a bit on the latency/bandwidth of
| your solution? I was poking around the site and couldn't find
| that answer immediately available.
| rozzie wrote:
| Happy to comment. We've been working on this for several
| years now and we're super proud of what we see people
| building and deploying.
|
| The question is a bit general, so let me just give you some
| related facts.
|
| - Because more than half our customers use this in a
| battery-powered way (such as a tracker), the normal
| operating mode (json-configured) is "normally quiescent"
| (~8uA draw) with the modem powered off completely. You
| program the sync period and can also kick off syncs
| manually, for example if you sense an urgent condition.
|
| - In this "periodic mode", syncs are usually take about 15
| seconds to register, 1 or 2 seconds to sync, and then
| hanguup. If you configure for TLS it sends about 4KB for
| the TLS session setup, and if you don't care about on-wire
| encryption you can use straight TCP at about 1KB. A half
| dozen reasonably-sized JSON notes compresses to about
| 250-500 bytes on the wire.
|
| - Many customers don't use it battery-powered - such as
| embedding it inside an air handler or generator, etc. When
| in this mode, you can configure (JSON) it to be connected
| in a "continuous" mode. Not much downside - just a 1 packet
| (40 byte TCP header + 1 byte) for a ping every 20m for
| robustness.
|
| When in continuous mode you get "instant sync" upstream,
| and get a bonus feature: If you use an HTTPS (JSON) API to
| send an inbound message to the device, it syncs instantly
| to the device.
|
| - Our packets are so tiny that nobody ever thinks about
| actual modem bandwidth. However, you'll notice it when
| you're using it for firmware update. (We support DFU of
| modem, of our firmware, and of your own host MCU's
| firmware.)
|
| We have 2 primary SKUs for the product: our "Narrowband"
| SKUs based on BG95 which support three RATS: LTE Cat-M1
| (~375Kbps), LTE Cat-NB1 (~64Kbps), and GSM (~100Kbps).
|
| For $10 more you can buy our "Wideband" SKUs based on EG91
| which supports LTE Cat-1 4G/LTE, 3G, and GSM. These go up
| to 10Mbps.
|
| Hope you find this interesting.
| ohazi wrote:
| It's an M.2 key E connector, not a PCI connector, but it
| doesn't follow the M.2 standard -- they're just reusing a
| cheaply available connector. The microcontroller they're using
| doesn't support PCIe, so it's probably just power, some serial
| interfaces, and maybe some boot/reset/interrupt pins.
|
| As such, you should have far less of an issue integrating this
| onto a custom board than a real M.2 card that uses PCIe or USB.
| seam wrote:
| ah very interesting. Thank You for the correction! I quickly
| saw what looked like pci and some GPIO options.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Looks like you communicate through that header over I2C,
| USB, or "serial"... which I am not sure if they mean SPI or
| UART/USART (or yes).
| pryelluw wrote:
| Suggestion for docs:
|
| - Please include a clear link to the dev boards from the main
| menu.
|
| - The back button seems to be hijacked. I went from blues.io to
| dev.blues.io and couldn't navigate back with the back button.
| Mobile safari.
| ds wrote:
| In a modified configuration, this will completely eat the gps
| tracker market. The pricing is insane. Normally if you want to
| track something like a car, you have to get a little tracking
| device (Which to be fair can be had from alibaba for ~$15) and
| put a sim in it at a minimum of $10/month.
|
| Getting a ping every 10 minutes with location is more than ample
| for most things. I suppose you could also give it a request to
| turn on minute-based updates as well if need be.
| rozzie wrote:
| You may be interested to know that the Notecard + Notecarrier-
| AA, without any host MCU, and with just a couple lines of JSON
| to configure it, act as a tracker. It has on-board GNSS plus
| antenna, plus an accelerometer so that it doesn't consume
| energy when not in motion. (It draws about 8uA when idle.)
|
| Also, if you want to pair it with a $2 ESP32 configured with
| ESP-AT firmware, the built-in firmware will also do WiFi
| triangulation.
|
| Yes, we have customers using it as a simple tracker. However,
| to be clear, this is not a complete "to the glass" tracking
| solution. All it does is to send tracking data to your service
| via HTTP JSON. If you have a system that "just wants the data",
| this is a perfect solution.
| ds wrote:
| I know you guys likely want to focus on being the shovel vs
| the gold miner, but if you were to setup a ready-to-go
| tracking package, You would easily take over the entire
| market.
|
| The amount that insurance companies pay for services to track
| leased-cars, Shipping carriers wanting to track high value
| items, etc.. Its a massive market- and all of them are paying
| 3-5$/month per tracker.
|
| You should consider making a white labeled tracker 'company'
| you own in house. You could charge easily, 4-5x more than you
| do for the product. Its also the most obvious use case for
| your product. You would kill it.
| topspin wrote:
| I agree with your prediction about the market value of low
| cost trackers. I've been searching for a low cost way to
| track things for a long time.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This looks cool, too bad Ray Ozzie is a huge piece of shit
| Karsteski wrote:
| Why do you say this?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Because of how he behaved wrt to the Groove staff when he
| sold the company to Microsoft
| baybal2 wrote:
| Who is that Ozzie?
| yellowfish wrote:
| lotus notes, and a fill in for creepybill at microsoft for a
| while
| pitched wrote:
| What's "creepybill"? Obviously Bill Gates but a quick search
| isn't showing what's it a reference to?
| yellowfish wrote:
| many inappropriate relationships and sexual advances on
| employees while he was at microsoft
|
| edit: you downvote this but cry about horrible the
| treatment of women at companies like Blizzard, get real
| it's the same thing except creepybill has more money and
| clout
| sgerenser wrote:
| Presumably the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by
| Bill Gates: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-
| harassment-inappr...
| bityard wrote:
| Tangentially related: I set up a security camera based on
| Raspberry Pi in an area with no wifi. It sends notifications and
| pictures to my phone when any motion is detected. From T-Mobile,
| the hotspot was free and the data plan is $5 a month. The data
| plan only has a few hundred meg of "fast" data but unlimited
| 128k/sec after that. Which is perfectly fine since the images it
| sends are usually around 100k each. It's been working great for
| months.
|
| A rare trifecta of cheap, easy, and good. (Although it did take a
| weekend to build and test.)
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer, could you share a link or search term
| for this plan?
| myelin wrote:
| I see the $5/month plan here: https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-
| phone-plans/affordable-data-pl...
|
| Their hotspot page shows two which are free with a 5GB plan,
| but I can't find a deal which makes them free with the 512MB
| one though.
| matttrotter wrote:
| Nice!! You could spend $49 on this, and after 500 MB (~5000
| pictures?), just buy another one and replace it!
|
| Have any project pages? GitHub? website? etc?
| ipspam wrote:
| I don't fully understand this kind of thing, but it gives me a
| small selfish hope..... That I can have a decade of remote car
| starting from anywhere for less than the current fee for 1 year.
| gffrd wrote:
| There's a fee for remote car starting?? Is this an aftermarket
| thing or a factory thing?
| chomp wrote:
| Some vehicles have cellular built-in to where you can start
| your vehicle with your phone remotely. Some make it free,
| others charge for it.
| rozzie wrote:
| You can easily develop this, and you won't pay anything except
| for the Notecard. It'll work until you reach 500MB or 10 years,
| whichever is sooner. (We offer the ability to upgrade beyond
| 500MB.)
| lallysingh wrote:
| Is that 500MB total transferred over the 10 years? Or per month?
| rob_lauer wrote:
| 500MB over 10 years, but you can "top up" if need-be. A primary
| use case would be for sensor data which can stretch 500MB a
| long time, not high-bandwidth streaming video.
| devmor wrote:
| I feel like with the sheer amount of IoT options available, using
| hardware that's vendor-locked to a cloud service is a risky move.
|
| Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can
| use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Depending on where/how you're deploying this, "swapping the
| SIM" may be non-trivial. I could definitely see cases where it
| would be desirable to have someone else take ownership of the
| whole data pipeline, keeping the radio firmware up to date,
| whatever.
|
| Though yeah, definitely you and your investors need to have
| enough confidence in this venture to want to hitch your train
| to it.
| wmf wrote:
| They claim to be 10x cheaper.
| [deleted]
| altantiprocrast wrote:
| > hardware that's vendor-locked to a cloud service is a risky
| move.
|
| AFAIK from an above comment by @rozzie the protocol is open and
| the domain can be changed. So it should be possible for someone
| to write a self hostable server
|
| https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hu...
| https://github.com/blues/note
| rozzie wrote:
| I believe the greatest unrealized potential is for product
| manufacturers to embed cloud connectivity without the end-user
| needing to do anything to get it working.
|
| The Kindle Whispernet model is my ideal, where you make an up-
| front decision to buy a cell-enabled product and it just works.
|
| The classic model of monthly charging, activation,
| deactivation, etc used by the likes of the Apple Watch are not
| good for IoT because then someone needs to - ensure that your
| device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified -
| sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay
| a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) -
| figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or
| end-of-life - and so on.
|
| Of course, if you want to just use the Notecard with your own
| SIM, you can. The Notecard and all the standard Notecarriers
| have an external SIM slot (usually used when someone wants to
| use it in a non-covered country such as China).
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure
| they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were
| selling with it, and trying to break into the market and
| willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired
| it. That means it was not working pricewise.
|
| To put it this way lets say the ODM makes a device for 40
| bucks and sells it to you for 50. Their cost to their
| MDN/carrier is say 1 dollar per month per device. That means
| at best they can float you for is 10 months before you start
| costing them money. That does not involve any other services
| they may have to pay for to make that connection happen
| (support, VMs/machines, phone lines, datalines, buildings,
| etc). But if there is an extra ARPU on each unit that time to
| cost you money is much longer and in some cases never happen.
|
| They way they priced this it looks like they are trying to
| get people into the ecosystem and are willing to eat some
| cost on that. Hoping to get a few whale accounts to cover the
| 'free' bits.
|
| > ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get
| it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract -
| acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and
| sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly
| pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on
|
| That is exactly what MDNs like this do. They do that carrier
| abstraction for you. They do however charge for it. Each of
| the big carriers also do this and have programs for it. They
| have a list of pre-certified devices and 'try before you buy'
| style programs.
| rozzie wrote:
| I was using Whispernet as an example of a great user
| experience; that's all.
|
| There are no tricks and our prepaid/embedded pricing is
| real, and we will never sell anything for a loss. We're
| selling commercial IoT and our business must be
| sustainable. (Free tier of Notehub is an acquisition cost
| and that cost is extremely low.)
| majormajor wrote:
| > Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure
| they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were
| selling with it, and trying to break into the market and
| willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired
| it. That means it was not working pricewise.
|
| 3G Whispernet couldn't outlast the carriers getting rid of
| the hardware to support those frequencies. So yes, that
| means "forever" didn't work price-wise, in that Amazon
| didn't feel it was worthwhile to build their own outdated-
| tech cell network just to continue it, but it was still a
| reasonable "for most of the life of the device" offer -
| note that newer devices have 4g and still will work.
| Jolter wrote:
| Can someone edit the title? Ray Ozzie doesn't ring any bells and
| the title of the page is "The Notecard makes cellular IoT
| developer-friendly. Finally." So the current title is already
| editorializing.
| __sy__ wrote:
| He was basically the CTO at Microsoft for a number of years and
| that's just a short-snapshot into his long, successful career
| :)
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Ray Ozzie is well known for being the creator of Lotus Notes
| and being the CTO and CSA of Microsoft for half a decade
| (taking over for Bill Gates as CSA) and introduced Azure during
| his time, and now the director of the board at HPE.
| SubuSS wrote:
| Sorry dumb question: what are the dimensions of the board? I am
| not able to find this anywhere on the site.
| trollied wrote:
| Here: https://github.com/blues/note-
| hardware/tree/master/Notecard
|
| The PDFs have dimensions
| ourcat wrote:
| With this offer of $49 for "10 years of cellular" (and 500Mb data
| [1]) included, I wonder which LTE network is expected to provide
| and support that connectivity for that long?
|
| Something like this could be a good candidate for what the Helium
| Network (and similar) are intending to do.
|
| [1] : https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-
| wbex-5...
| bassman9000 wrote:
| 500Mb across the 10years? Monthly?
| kbenson wrote:
| Based on prior comments from the seller, for the life. And so
| nobody else has to compute it, that's:
|
| 5,256,000 minutes in 10 years (ignoring leap years)
|
| 500,000,000 bytes of data (assuming mega and not mebi)
|
| An average of 95 bytes a minute per device over that 10
| years, or an average of 951 bytes every 10 minutes, or more
| than 5k an hour. For event messages, that seems like
| something that can be worked within fairly easily, depending
| on use.
| rozzie wrote:
| Truth in advertising: As stated in another response above,
| if you want to do a real computation you need to factor-in
| "session setup" overhead. If you config for TCP/IP
| (unencrypted) your session overhead is about 1kb. If you
| config for TLS, your session overhead is just under 4KB.
| Once the session starts, data transfer is super efficient -
| probably about 250-500 bytes for a half dozen or dozen
| notes of typical size. Session duration is typically 1-2
| seconds.
|
| The other secret of most IoT platforms is that their
| negotiated rates round sessions to 1KB boundaries. That's
| insane for IoT. For ours there is no rounding, and the
| 'practical' rounding is the 40-byte TCP/IP header.
| rozzie wrote:
| The Notecard auto-activates on first use. Without a recharge,
| it will "just work" until the earlier of a) 10 years b) 500MB
| of data used
|
| If you need more years or more data we can help, but in the
| vast, vast majority of narrowband use cases we've found this
| to be quite sufficient.
| ourcat wrote:
| That's what it comes loaded with. 500Mb data and 10 years
| connectivity, which I assume you can top-up.
| Eifoov7h11 wrote:
| > cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity
|
| sounds like a security nightmare
| rozzie wrote:
| Not so much.
|
| On-board STSAFE secure element with ST-issued ECC P-384
| certificate provisioned at point of chip manufacture.
|
| Sessions are TLS-encrypted to the Notehub:
| TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
|
| Kind of wonderfully, all traffic flows from the carrier over a
| VLAN to the AWS/Azure Notehub instances, so your devices aren't
| even visible to attackers on the internet.
|
| And if you don't want your data in the clear on the Notehub,
| there are options for you to place your server's public key in
| fleet environment variables, and the data will be end-to-end
| encrypted between device and your service.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Interestingly, setting aside whatever else you can say about
| Lotus Notes, Ray's work was some of the earliest to prioritize
| what we now recognize as good infosec practices in
| client/server computing.
|
| He's got plenty of street cred in this area, enough to earn the
| benefit of the doubt.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Only if your attackers pay for access - just kidding, but in
| this approach the board isn't connected all the time I don't
| think, only when it sends a message.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I might have been interested if "flat rate" didn't really mean
| "Tracphone subscription model". I'm sick and tired of SaaS
| companies nickle-and-diming me, I'm certainly not going to add a
| second cellular plan to my stack anytime soon.
| Animats wrote:
| The first one is always free. Here's the actual pricing.[1]
|
| There's a free tier limited to 5,000 events/month. The "Deploy"
| tier is $5,389.20 per project/year, plus event charges, plus a
| "connectivity assurance" charge.
|
| Still, you could get a lot done with the free tier if you didn't
| overdo the traffic. Every half hour, "Soda machine #5621, no
| alarms, outside temp 82F, inside temp 36F, cash $75.25, stock
| level for Diet Pepsi 4, stock level for Sprite 50..."
|
| [1] https://blues.io/services/
| matt2000 wrote:
| Is that pricing for an additional service that is optional, or
| is it required to operate the card? I'm confused.
| asah wrote:
| same here - "Prototype" ($0/mon) looks like what most
| hobbyists would use who exceed 5K/mon:
|
| https://blues.io/services/
| rozzie wrote:
| See above. It's not required to use the Notecard, but it's
| extremely easy to use and convenient. The combination of the
| Notecard and the Notehub are essentially a simple JSON-
| centric "data pump", with a good deal of carrier data
| included.
|
| We've priced it so we can make an "infrastructure-
| appropriate" profit on a sustainable basis; there's no
| 'surprise' business model and your data and your devices are
| yours, not ours.
| rozzie wrote:
| Yes, if you use our Notehub there is a free tier, and higher
| tiers are still very reasonable. (It does cost money to run
| infrastructure.)
|
| That said, although we don't talk much about it, the HN crowd
| may be interested in knowing that this exists:
| https://github.com/blues/note
|
| If you want to use the Notecard and you like Golang, you can
| spin up your own server and switch the notecard to speak with
| it via the "host" field in this JSON request:
| https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hu...
| oliwarner wrote:
| "That's all you pay", says the website.
|
| That seem significantly inaccurate if the deploy cost could
| be over 100x the headline "that's all you pay" figure.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I know "meta" is discouraged on HN but I absolutely love that
| I can participate in a forum where Ray Ozzie replies to a
| comment made by John Nagle.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think it's not so much that meta is discouraged as much
| as knee-jerk emotional meta reactions are, because they
| rarely lead to useful discussion. Complaining about
| downvotes or that you think the mods are being unfair are
| ultimately selfish actions most the time that drag the rest
| of the discussion down. At the same time, people sharing
| some of their favorite "HN discussion brought amazing
| person to the fore that shared" moments and links to them
| has allowed me and others to revisit and share in those
| moments and learn some of those amazing things shared even
| though we weren't part of that discussion.
| ourcat wrote:
| I see there's a board for an ESP-32 Huzzah Feather devkit,
| which can run a web server too. Interesting.
|
| Also interesting is no need for 'KYC'.
| samstave wrote:
| So.... if you were to connect this free board to something,
| such that it provided GPS coords in each message (whats max
| msg length? It would seem that you can do ~6 messages per
| hour, every hour, for the month - for free?
|
| Is this correct?
|
| So I can make a GPS child tracker for my kids backpacks - and
| it would just cost the $50 -- EDIT, ah for 10 years.
|
| This is wonderful.
|
| We attempted to negotiate this in 2007 after leaving
| Lockheeds RFID division, and nobody would touch it :-( for
| our sensors.
| chris1993 wrote:
| Why is it desirable to track the kids backpacks? Are they
| so very untidy that they often get lost?
| samstave wrote:
| Backpacks are a mechanism for transporting your
| belongings in a convenient bag fashioned with straps such
| that you may wear it, carry your belongings AND have your
| hands free.
|
| They would typically be worn by the child, and thus a
| good indicator of where your snowflake is.
|
| But I want to use this to put on BIKES!
| rlonn wrote:
| I've also thought about building a GPS child tracker, as I
| haven't found any reasonable/good existing options out
| there. Tell me if you need any assistance. I am a semi-
| incompetent full stack developer with IoT experience,
| reachable at hello at pushdata. io
| jsilence wrote:
| Would also be interested.
| rozzie wrote:
| Yep, your scenario works and it's completely possible and
| plausible.
|
| Messages are extremely small and efficient OTA (highly
| optimized and compressed).
|
| The API is JSON and messages are your own unconstrained
| JSON object, but they're transmitted as compressed binary.
| (You can also have a binary payload 'attachment' to a JSON
| message if you so choose.)
|
| Although everything works fine if the messages are
| individually in the KB's, that's not the design center
| because of how we manage memory on our (STM32L4R5) MCU.
|
| Things work most efficiently when the app uses lots of
| small messages. We buffer them in flash, and power-on the
| modem at user-settable intervals (or conditions) for
| upload.
| sambe wrote:
| I don't get how the front page could be so clearly misleading
| and not expect to get found out. It's all about nothing hidden
| and "that's all you pay" until you click pricing and then there
| are many different charges and models.
| jxf wrote:
| This doesn't look misleading to me. 5,000 events per month is
| very reasonable for a hobbyist project and the Prototype free
| tier is pretty generous as things go.
| topspin wrote:
| One message every 8.something minutes. Very useful for an
| 'asset' tracker.
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