Arduino board adds Sigfox low power wireless for IoT | Hacker News Reader

Arduino board adds Sigfox low power wireless for IoT

electronicsweekly.com

42 pointsrbanffy45 comments

I have made a project with the SigFox network and I absolutely love it.

I have also worked with LoRa and wrote a blog post comparing working with both networks: https://raed.it/blog/iot-network-sigfox-vs-lora/

I would think that LoRa, with similar footprint and bandwidth, would be a better adder for hobby boards, as you could own both ends of the system and not have to interface with a third-party (SigFox), 2-years subscription included not withstanding.

LoRa is in the pipeline but it requires you to either setup your own gateways or join somebody else's network ($$). SigFox is setting up networks globally and this board also comes with geolocation included in the subscription. So if you want to make a low power sensor node that works now this is s good product

The Things Network is currently building an open, federated LoRa network: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/

They already have complete coverage of many cities and everyone can contribute.

Massimo this is great. LoRa client support and maybe also an Arduino LoRa Gateway it will be amazing for rolling out nodes in agriculture. These areas are often not served by existing networks so a DIY-solution will always have its spot.

There is a Shield + Gateway coming out soon , the Lora Alliance will use it as a dev kit. In the summer we'll have a MKR format board. SigFox is good becaue it can deliver now on a lot of use cases

A couple years ago, for a RHoK event, we imagined a network of seismic/motion sensors using cellphone brains on top of poles that could be dropped from planes and penetrate enough in the soil to remain steady and signal land movements before landslides.

This could be a really cool way of deploying (or dropping) a network with a mesh backbone.

Massimo, at what price range an capabilities are you aiming your gateway, since it's currently quite expensive - 200euro + for a multi channel model.

Might be a very newbie question, but is there something like this for WiFi? I mean, something that like SigFox can run "6 months on 2 AA batteries" for WiFi for Arduino?

EDIT: I meant the same amount of data as with Sigfox, i.e. about 10K a day (specifically I just want to fetch some local weather data basically, maybe some traffic data as well).

6 months might be way too long for WiFi. A lot of factors come into place to achieve at least one month. Just to mention the most obvious is the frequency of data transfer.

Yes, that's missing from my original post, but I meant about the same amount of data as with Sigfox but for WiFi.

So, max will be about some 10K per day.

ESP8266 is a popular low-power WiFi chip, you can use it with a separate micro-controller but for many applications you don't need one. "ESP8266 consumes less than 12uA in sleep mode and less than 1.0mW (DTIM=3) or less than 0.5mW (DTIM=10) to stay connected to the access point." [0] Elsewhere it says it can wake-up and transmit within 2ms but I'd take that with a grain of salt.

I'm having trouble finding the same details about the MKRFOX1200 but for the transmitter "Low current consumption: 32.7mA during telegram transmit [...] Typical OFF mode current: 5nA." [1] The processor part is a SAMD21.

My guess is it's possible to get comparable idle/sleep power draw regardless of transmission method but WiFi will require more power to establish a connection and transmit the first byte.

[0] https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ESP8266_Specificati...

[1] http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-9372-Smart-RF-ATA8520_Data...

I see, thank you for the thorough explanation. Also because my first guess would be to turn on an off the antena whenever I needed data, but after what you described I see that's not as straightforward and depending on the number of updates it may actually be better to leave it on for longer periods of time.

I'm really ignorant about radio and even electricity so don't let my googling and wild-ass guesses scare you off. There are many helpful "maker" fora populated by people who can provide educated advice.

Sigfox, Wifi, or else, my recommendation is the same : when you have nothing to say, do nothing :)

In most "connected" devices, you don't need to keep an established connection which will drain the battery fast.

This is why idle consumption is key, as it will often be the state of the solution 99.x% of the time

Simply turn the communication module on when you need it.

Then the difference between solutions consumption-wise will be on time needed to establish connection if any, time & power to send your data.

See other comment for a few suggested Wifi components, to my knowledge Wifi won't match the low power consumption at least:. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14141026

WiFi is far too power hungry for that, AFAIK. However the Arduino itself (rather the Atmel AVR chip that powers it) should definitely be capable of running months at a time on batteries, with proper programming.

I tried to look for subscription costs, €1 to €15 per device per year according to: https://novemberfive.co/blog/internet-of-things-lora-vs-sigf...

The article says it comes with a 2-year subscription for upto 140 messages per day.

I can see this being useful for collecting field data of sorts, but unfortunately probably only in select urban areas. Coverage outside a few major cities is spotty or nonexistent.

I believe it's possible to have an agreement with sigfox to run a base station. We have it in the office, it's a 1 Rack unti device so it doesn't take a huge amount of space and it has a pretty long range

Are there any possibilities to have "private" base stations that don't need a subscription? (Or in exchange for running a public base station, I get unlimited communication to my own base station?)

There is a network emulator (USB key), but we're not 100% happy with it. Which is why it's not advertised for sale yet.

But if someone is interested to give it a try in not-yet-covered areas in the US or elsewhere, let me know : devrelations@sigfox.com ; I could mail one for free in exchange of test feedback

———

Hosting a public base station in exchange of discount/free subscriptions is something that could be considered. Again, feel free to reach out :) One thing to consider : Public base station means that other users will rely on it for their own devices, with a need for reliability (uptime, backhaul connectivity, ..)

Great to know thank you!

(Nicolas @Sigfox)

What area are you thinking about ? In western/northern Europe, coverage is already pretty solid nationwide. Agriculture is one of the rising usecase: weather monitoring, soil chemistry, etc... Check sigfox.com/coverage for details about live coverage

As shown on this map, US coverage is mostly in some metro areas right now. But this is just the beginning there.

Yep I meant mostly because I'm in the US. I'm totally interested in this once the network coverage gets better.

I mentioned elsewhere in the thread a beta Sigfox Network Emulator.

Let me know if you could be interested in testing it.

What makes you think that? Did you test it?

It's special low-power long-range radios that covers many miles per tower and they are installing a ton of them all across the world.

It is absolutely intended to NOT be limited to urban areas.

Little reason to run anything other than ubiquitous Wi-Fi imho.

You can run an ESP8266 or ESP32 chip, or the Realtek RTL8710 chip which is $2 from Pine64, and probably have enough input and output pins to do the job.

Completely different use case. LoRa and Sigfox is for extremely low-bandwith, low-power, mostly one way communication (think sensor data).

You pretty much cannot do this with WiFi due to power usage.

It depends what you mean by low power. What is your definition of low power?

The WiFi enabled chips I mentioned have low power modes where you can wake up either periodically or based on an interrupt , with most of the chip turned off in the meantime. I'd have to read the docs to know about power usage in different modes. The RTL8710 claims 30 mA...

With good programming you can get many 8bit microcontrollers into the micro and nano amp range.

Sleeping for 60 seconds, waking up, then sleeping again gets the RTL chip at least, into about 0.3 average milliamps. The 8195 is very similar to the 8710 https://www.amebaiot.com/en/ameba-arduino-power-management/

Yes, but that still doesn't give you years in battery life as with LoRa.

I agree with you for the IoT devices I would create in my life, as I am around WiFi in all of those cases (home, office, etc). However for sensor networks in rural areas this would be a great solution. For example, the water reservoirs where I live report live statistics to a server and I can see in real time what the levels of them are (along with other data, like rainfall, temperature, etc). There's no WiFi in the backcountry!

Wifi has an incredibly limited range compared to these technologies. You'd need a repeater every dozen meters or so, which means running power to all of those repeaters. Meanwhile SigFox can run up to 50km. That's a huge reason to run SigFox instead of wifi.

With your reasoning, we might as well take down all the cell phone towers and just make calls over wifi, wifi is everywhere right?

I wasn't aware that sigfox could travel such distances.

Then again you can do 10km+ with a grid antenna connected to one of the WiFi chips. It might look silly, but it would work.

WiFi is not exactly ubiquitous and it requires an infrastrucutre which is short range by definition. It's also power hungry. If your use case is to place several sensors in a vineyard without having to replace batteries every day you want something like sigfox. Your arguments works if you're a hobbyist hacking together a diy solution (i.e. you value your time 0 dollars) but if you're a company or a more professional user you might value the fact that this works out of the box, is well supported and manufactured to last in the field.

SigFox and wifi aren't really comparable at all. SigFox is ultra low power, ultra long range (up to 50km, they claim) and sends only 12 bytes of data per message.

Right, but SigFox is claiming IoT will mean 500 devices in the typical house. With at least 1Euro/year/device subscription cost, that's a minimum of 500 Euros per year. A typical house has wifi already, so it could be a lot cheaper to use low-power Wifi instead.

The 500-device-home seems to be SigFox's primary target. If so, then they're de facto competing with wifi.

I suspect they're either speaking broadly, or thinking in terms of having sensors in everything, always reporting readings. Their tech doesn't seem particularly suited for interactive devices, because the protocol requires the device to poll the network and see if there are messages waiting for it.

Edit: Also I'm fairly certain that WiFi will choke long before you get close to having 500 devices in an area the size of a house.

Great mentions. In my case, this is appealing especially for the <20mA power consumption for battery-powered nodes to place and leave for 1-2+ years.

I'm curious what the fundamental underlying tech is that is driving Lora and Sigfox? E.g. cdma has a few core ideas that make the magic work. What is the equivalent fundamental concept that is driving the low-power, long-range, low-bw communication?

Sigfox relies on

* Ultra Narrow Band (100Hz) modulation

* Low data rate (100 bits/s in Europe, at 14dBm/25mW) + lightweight protocol

* High receiver sensitivity, mostly SDR based

We've got a few youtube videos explaining this ... but mostly targeted for a generic audience. The "radio signal modulation" may have enough tech details to match what you're looking for : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvM6KEDIdE&index=6&list=PLc...

We're also working on a publication of a standard UNB IoT protocol, Sigfox being one of its implementations. Should come within a few weeks.

There is a draft about the network architecture here : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zuniga-lpwan-sigfox-s...

If only the US had decent coverage!

Working on it! It's a pretty big country ...

So far, you have solid coverage in some metro areas only : SF/North Bay, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, Houston (Miami & others are getting there)

Check out sigfox.com/coverage to get insights on the current production coverage (Sorry for the colours ...)

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