Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity
blues.io
blues.io
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..."
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.
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...
Also interesting is no need for 'KYC'.
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.
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!
Are you thinking about theft tracking or some other use case?
Though I have to say I saw a youtube video recently (sorry to lazy to google it) where someone put an apple tracking device in a bike and was able to locate it after it was stolen.
Of course, this unreasonable fear of abductions means that a commercial GPS tracker for kids would sell much better if it supported the "abducted kid" use case well, on top of more likely use cases.
Unless you talk about the wilderness.
Actually when I let my kids go outside alone, I usually give them a phone. I live in a big city. Reception could be a problem in the countryside.
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.
I'd like to know how small a configuration with a Notecard + carrier can be?
For sewing into a kids backpack I think it looks like it will be small enough, but in my mind, putting a tracker inside a shoe would be much better. A backpack is easily forgotten or lost somewhere, but shoes tend to stay with the person. However, to put it in a shoe it'd have to be pretty small.
This is really cool, but I don’t see any information on costs if you go over the 500mb of cellular data. Probably missed it, but I did click around a lot trying.
The 500MB - is that per month - or once for the lifetime of the 10-year cell-"contract" of the card? (if once, how refill once depleted?)
THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS!.
(Also, while at Lockheed, our division was one of the early adopters of Groove. Sadly, we had factions who loved it and wanted to use it and factions who didnt want to change their workflows. -- As the head of IT, I liked it, although it had some quirks... it was too bad we didnt "find our groove" with Groove at the time. But the vision behind it was dope.)
My personal armchair worry is that it makes them likely to accept a dystopian surveillance society without even considering that it might be problematic.
That seem significantly inaccurate if the deploy cost could be over 100× the headline "that's all you pay" figure.
We are working through the final elements of a website revamp right now. I chose to update the whole site, rather than do it piece by piece so please accept my apology.
If you comment to this thread, I'll circle back and let everyone know when the site is updated and you can tell us what you think about it.
Nobody expects to be able to pull a 10,000gallon tanker truck up to a "free refills" soda station in a fast food joint and fill it.
Anybody who's in the target market for these also understands the "Includes IoT cellular connectivity for 10 years" isn't going to mean "Cool! I'll get one of these to stream 4K video to youtube 24x7x356x10, sweet!!!"
It’s going to be kilobytes.
My point is, there is quite an involved pricing model - 5 tiers, each tier has multiple charges in it, none of them obviously correspond to the advertising on the front page. They even repeatedly use the phrase "for X MB" which is unclear to me. I first read it as storage. I assume it means total upload/download? The numbers for this on other devices on the front page are not mentioned on the pricing page. Charging categories also have a mixture of sold-by-the-MB and sold-by-usage, as well as pre-sold - within a single tier.
The front page is selling "look, it's very clear and simple" and it's just obviously not clear and simple. Unclear why that view garners downvotes - this is honest feedback about their marketing and pricing. Even if they are mostly talking about the free tier, it's not clear
Door lock.
Window shade.
Light switch.
Washing machine.
BBQ.
Pet feeder.
Sprinklers.
...or as we saw a few days ago: desk raiser/lowerer.
A rare trifecta of cheap, easy, and good. (Although it did take a weekend to build and test.)
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.
Have any project pages? GitHub? website? etc?
That sounds very wasteful, to throw hardware away because a subscription ended.
Did you use the app "motion" with a post-hook?
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
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.
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.
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.
My use case would probably want to push a fair amount of data (say 1MB) very infrequently in a semi interactive mode so there would be a user waiting for the transfer to complete. Thanks!
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.
They all equivalently are JSON request/response ports. I2c uses a simple serial-over-I2C protocol.
Most customers use the I2C or low power UART interfaces because the device only uses ~8uA when listening on those ports. (Our internal MCU can listen on those ports while in STOP2 mode.)
Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?
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).
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.
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.
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.)
It looks like pre-paid data cards which eventually 'run out'. Which should keep you from having any loss. Aside from incidental support and promotional costs.
It sounds like you are building a similar business that I used to work at. Good luck! It is a tough market with a long tail sales cycle. Some go 'quick' and are up and running in a couple of months. Some take a couple years to get really going.
If I have one piece of advice. Keep an eye on your 'connect/disconnect' metrics. You always get that one device that will decide to bounce the connection 80k times per day. Get a few dozen of those and it will swamp out your other devices.
I feel like this is a double-edged sword for consumer products. Right now, I can keep my smart TV 'dumb' by not connecting it to my WiFi. I have reservations about a TV that has a GPS antenna (for my Zip code) and has its own pipe to the internet that I have no control over.
Or maybe just covering the entire back of the TV with foil tape would do the trick in most cases.
Though yeah, definitely you and your investors need to have enough confidence in this venture to want to hitch your train to it.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, if you want to pair it with a $2 ESP32 configured with ESP-AT firmware, the built-in firmware will also do WiFi triangulation.
Yes, we have customers using it as a simple tracker. However, to be clear, this is not a complete "to the glass" tracking solution. All it does is to send tracking data to your service via HTTP JSON. If you have a system that "just wants the data", this is a perfect solution.
The amount that insurance companies pay for services to track leased-cars, Shipping carriers wanting to track high value items, etc.. Its a massive market- and all of them are paying 3-5$/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.
So do it. :-)
My guess is that by the time to build that as an end-user suitable product (including stuff like enclosure, packaging/i, structions, distribution, retail channel, support, etc) and stand up the web service dashboard and write the mobile apps, unless you can go from zero to 100k units in the field immediately, you're gonna end up at similar end-user pricing. 4-5 times more for the product (which is still only a couple of hundred bucks) is a lot of years of $15 Alibaba GPS tracker with $3-5/month subscription SIMs in them.
I'd bet good money that trying to outcompete existing produce segments on price isn't going to be the unicorn success stories that are told of customers for these in 3-5 years time, it'll be people who've thought up entirely new markets and product categories that this device makes possible.
There are other platforms like this.
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.
Another question, could this work well with something like Firebase? the event retention restrictions on Notehub would put a spanner in the works for my use case.
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.
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.
"Physical Interface - If a physical control interface is required for the End Product, it shall utilize one of the following: USB, PCMCIA, Compact Flash, MMC, RS-232 (DE9), or IEEE-1394. No other physical control interfaces are acceptable."
http://www.ptcrb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PTCRB-PPMD-3...
Curious how an M.2 based connector was allowed here as they are explicitly called out as connectors allowed for PTRCB modules, not end devices.
- 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.
The PDFs have dimensions
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
sounds like a security nightmare
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.
He's got plenty of street cred in this area, enough to earn the benefit of the doubt.