Electronics Weekly
Based on Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT system-in-package with GPS, the battery-powered Thingy:91 comes with a roaming SIM card, 16 sensors and a nRF52840 for short-range wireless communication with Bluetooth 5, Thread, Zigbee and ANT.
The SIM is a Nano (4FF) eSIM card from iBasis, pre-loaded with 10Mbyte of data, for which Nordic claims connectivity and roaming in “a long and growing list of countries with cellular IoT networks”.
An asset tracking application is included for “for straight-out-of-the-box operation”, according to Nordic. “This could take the form of shipping containers where individual items within the container can be tracked via short-range Bluetooth 5 – for example, their location within container and temperature, with the container itself and any important changes in the status of its contents tracked remotely via long-range cellular wireless technology.”
Physically, is comes in 60 x 60mm plastic and rubber case with a USB connector to charge the internal 1.44Ah Li-ion cell.
Its sensor list includes: temperature, humidity, air quality (Bosch BME680), and air pressure, colour-and-light and accelerometers.
Analog Devices provides the accelerometers: the low-g ADXL362 for motion sensing and wake-up and high-g ADXL372. Its ADP5360 power management chip is also built in.
The application processor in the nRF9160 is a 64MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with 1Mbyte of flash and 256kbyte of RAM available to the application. The Cortex-M33 has Arm’s TrustZone for trusted execution and CryptoCell for application layer security.
The broadband antenna is Fractus’ Trio mXtend chip antenna with three ports, allowing the connection of three independent radios – cellular, GNSS and Bluetooth for example.
“We are excited to help the IoT ecosystem transitioning to embedded antennas,” said Fractus v-p of innovation Carles Puente. “Thingy:91 is an example of how anyone can combine worldwide cellular connectivity and GNSS into a miniature chip antenna and get rid of any external pole.”
The Thingy is designed to be programmed using Nordic’s dedicated cellular IoT ‘nRF Connect SDK’ with integrated Zephyr RTOS. Software and hardware design files are available.
“Thingy:91 is aimed at professional developers and non-cellular IoT specialists alike,” said Nordic marketing manager John Leonard. “Not only does it allow developers new to the world of cellular IoT to get a PoC up and running quickly to gain project and budget approvals, it also makes turning that PoC into a real product straightforward, right down to using the same code and development environment.”
Asset tracking is the prime application foreseen, for containers, livestock, people, parcels and equipment.
