Thanks Steph - I’ve not used Kickstart before so I misunderstood. Thank you for the quick response.
It is great to see Electron now ships worldwide, I backed one!
Me too so happy its available in Australia now!
Hello. I was hoping for some clarification.
Could you just use your SIM card in any 2g or 3g enabled (low-bandwidth) device that supports such a module and subscribe only to the data plan? If so, when would this be available?
We haven’t yet decided whether to support other hardware with the SIM, but I’m sure it’s something we’ll be discussing over the next couple of months. Feedback would definitely be helpful! What would you use it for?
Hi,
Do you intend to develop a module of the Electron like the P0/P1?
Thanks
The SARA gsm is sort of a module but not really a MCU so an STM32 is added.
You can treat the electron like a module itself for your application unless someone starts fabricating a module like that
@Besser - part of the reason we’re able to “modularize” the Photon is that the MCU and the Wi-Fi module are in one package. Unfortunately we’re not able to do that with the Electron (maybe that’s a feature of the Electron v2?)
However, unlike the Photon, we do recommend the Electron for high-volume production products. The reason for this is that cellular certifications are extremely burdensome. Using the Electron as-is out of the box will require no additional certifications. However, re-implementing the same circuit could be an immediate $20K to $100K of certification costs. Therefore it is still quite valuable even in products with decent volumes so that you can avoid those fixed costs.
Thanks @zach and @kennethlimcp!
About certifications, here in Brazil the approval of RF devices by ANATEL (like FCC) is mandatory…
I’m really excited about Proton,Electron and all Spark IO ecosystem, great job!
ah, sorry to hear that. Do you know if that's true for development kits as well? In most parts of the world, development kits do not technically need to be certified (we FCC/CE/IC certify our stuff anyway, even though it's not technically necessary for a development kit, because we want to help with certification for final products built using our tools).
Hi there,
I’am planning to develop a special weather station running abroad where no wifi is available. Is there any chance to get a Electron before Oct.15?
@digixx we had a beta tester level in our Kickstarter campaign, but that’s probably it for early access
Hi @zach! Sorry by late to respond…
Yes, all products that’s use RF needs the approval by ANATEL to be officially sold here in Brazil!
If I use the P0 or P1 in my future product, it (the P0/P1) will need to be certified by ANATEL, then my product will need to be certified to. But, until I understand, with certified of the RF module (P0/P1 in this case), to get approval of my future product will be more easy e less expensive.
The ANATEL always want to be different about the entire world!
PS: English isn’t my first language, so please excuse any mistakes and I’m working on to improve it!
I’m specifically interested in battery power. If I don’t add a change function, can I directly connect a LiPo battery? Or do I need a power shield.
@kasper, as long as the battery has built-in over-discharge protection then yes you can. Spark is on the cusp of introducing a new power shield which will work with all Spark products so stay tuned!
Hello, I just discovered you guys and preordered a couple of photons and an Electron. (I have been waiting for your product for years) I was wondering, if like cellphones, could you use tower triangulation and get low-resolution geolocation with the Electron. Obviously, you can hook up a GPS module, but if you only needed general location,does your hardware support this functionality?
The cellular module on the electron has a feature called CellLocate
The module can also provide a list of the surrounding cell towers which you can use to locate your Electron.
The real question is when these features will make it into the firmware, and that I cannot answer at this point
We do plan to support location, although it might be using data from the cell towers rather than the features on the hardware.
Does cell tower handshake data include the tower’s location info? Or do you have to use some sort of external service to retrieve the location of a tower based on its ID? Just curious.
I assume that once you have the locations of multiple towers, you can do some sort of weighted average to calculate location and error range based on signal strength for each?