Radiocrafts AS, a leading provider of RF modules and wireless connectivity solutions, announced on Febraury 20th 2018 a new Sensor Board development tool with integrated environmental and industrial sensors, supporting Wireless M-Bus and Sigfox networks. The new board is ideal for proof-of-concept of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) with wireless sensors.
“We are constantly adding new tools to provide ease-of-design for our clients” says Anders Oldebäck, Sales and Marketing Director at Radiocrafts. “The new Sensor Board will allow our clients to easily build prototype networks with real industrial sensors to get as close as possible to the final network configuration with a minimum investment in development time and resources”.
The new Sensor Board supplements the recently introduced compact sensor modules from Radiocrafts. The sensor modules for Sigfox (SSM) and the Wireless M-Bus (MSM) provide direct interfaces for a number of industrial and environmental sensors, such as temperature, humidity and gas. The sensors are carefully selected to enable users to build complete sensor nodes by just adding the sensor, an antenna and a power supply to the compact MSM module. Sensor interfaces supported includes analogue inputs, GPIO, SPI and I2C.
The Sensor Board is a development tool based on the new modules, offering a range of industry sensors on the board such as Temperature/Humidity sensor, Gas/pressure sensor, Accelerometer, Magneto-resistive/Hall sensor, Light sensor, Digital and Analogue inputs.
The Sensor Board is offered in different variants; two variants for Sigfox based on RC1682-SSM (Europe) and RC1692HP-SSM (US, Australia); and two variants for Wireless M-Bus based on RC1180-MSM (868 MHz) and RC1701HP-MSM (169 MHz).
In areas covered by the Sigfox network, the board will connect to the network and sensor data will be available in the Sigfox cloud service. A subscription to the service is included in the kit. Using the Wireless M-Bus variant, any standard gateway can be used to collect data from the board. The Development Kit also provides a Wireless M-Bus sniffer board and a PC application for easy access to data in a lab environment. The 169 MHz narrowband solution is an optimal solution for Industrial sensor networks where reliability, robustness and security are of great importance.
The new Sensor Board rely on proven, robust and widely deployed protocols, the Wireless MBus standard (EN 13757) or Sigfox. These protocols are very power efficient and ideal for sensors with an operating lifetime of 10-20 years on a single cell battery. The Wireless M-Bus variant at 868 MHz is ideal for home and building networks, whereas Sigfox and Wireless MBus at 169 MHz are Low Power Wide Area Networks ideal for long range IoT.