Pycom IoT Hackday Event

I had an interesting day this week at the Pycom IOT hackday event in Dublin. With a full room we each received a development kit consisting of a FiPy, expansion board, LoRa/Sigfox antenna, LTE-M antenna, and case. The room was a balanced mixture of enterprise developers and hobbyists, with some really interesting IoT applications. 

The busy agenda covered:

• Introduction and an overview of Pycom services on taking your idea from small scale to mass production.
• Setting up the Pymakr plugin for Visual Studio Code IDE. Getting up and running with interactive REPL and simple scripts written in Micropython.
• Overview of FiPy development board which contains wireless connectivity for WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa, Sigfox and Cellular LTE application.
• Connecting the hardware to Pybytes, Pycoms cloud based device management platform.
• Setting up a LoRa mesh network.
• Connecting your device to The Things Network.

The FiPy development board seems like a versatile platform for testing the common wireless solutions for IoT applications. Short range wireless communications are available using the onboard ESP32 chip which supports both classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE),  and WiFi. Bluetooth is suitable for short range applications typically less than 10m and have low power consumption. WiFi is suitable for ranges up to 50m, high data rates, and moderate power consumption (80mW).

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) applications are supported using the device LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT chips. These offer much greater ranges (2~5km urban, 5~15km rural environments), are suitable for small data packages (ideal for sensor data), and have very low transmitter power which is important for remote battery powered devices.

There was only so much that can be fitted into a single day event so I plan to spend some time exploring the development kit capabilities especially NB-IoT and support with the local cellular operators. The soon to be released Pygate seems like a very affordable 8 channel LoRaWAN gateway solution and suspect I will be buying one so I can continue to work with LoRa.