I meant Lithium Manganese lol. I currently use three LSD LMD batteries for my nodes, which gives me around 6Ah. The self discharge is rated at 10%/yr. My testnode is running for weeks now. I use scheduled transmits to control the power consumption. The MCU sleeps and only wakes up to increment a counter when external interrupts are triggered. Every 15 minutes the RTC wakes the unit up to perform some analog readings and to send a message containing the counters and the analog values.
Li-SOCl2 batteries are also very interesting, they have a self discharge of less than 3%/year, in a lot of cases outlasting the lifetime of the device they’re in . But they are expensive, around €24 for 3AH.
I’ve just made a Raspberry Pi HAT for testing the RM186 module. There’s also a built-in GPS module (u-blox CAM-M8) as well as a pressure sensor (altitude).
I’ve ordered PCB on OSH Park. Should be up-and-running soon !
That is good news as I was told that is required for the modules to accept new (user) software over BLE. So this might be the start of bluetooth up-datable nodes. (Not the Laird firmware, but our own code)
Can’t wait to get my hands on it as I have a customer project on hold while waiting for this feature.
I am having some problems flashing the new peripheral firmware. to test communication with my node, I first flashed the new BLE central firmware… with the old uploader v4.10 no problemo
2-
now the new BLE peripheral firmware with the new uploader v5.10 … ERROR platform ID mismatch ?
3-
maybe its the new uploader ? … back to the old one (but with the new firmware)
Yes it’s not clear but you can’t just change from Central to Peripheral roles via the UART upgrade because Peripheral uses a different Softdevice (a reserved block of code proprietary to Nordic that implements the BLE protocol).
Also remember to AT&F* after flashing because the settings format are different. It’ll be confused if you don’t.
I’ve already done that on my test module and it’s working well. I’ve enabled the virtual serial port ( AT+CFG 100 0x0001 ) and can now connect to interactive mode console for configuration with my phone.
This opens a lot of new possibilities!
I can imagine Laird will sell modules pre-configured as Peripherals in the future so you’ll be able to skip the J-Link step.
I don’t own a segger j-link device, I see prices from 8 to 300,-, can you advise one, can I use a china clone for this ? or do i need to buy the original edu version …
I can confirm this. The Central and peripheral role devices make use of different soft devices from Nordic that cannot be upgraded over the UART. It’s also worth noting that you can have peripheral (S110 soft device) or central (S120) soft device but not both together.
Booting into VSP via GPIO has two modes, bridge and command. In bridge mode, the radio is bridged to the UART transparently in a serial cable replacement kind of way. VSP command mode is very useful for configuring the APPEUI and APP key wirelessly. If you use the iOS LairdToolkit, you can use the VSP batch app, to configure the keys from a text file and thus avoiding finger trouble entering keys.
. But they are expensive, around €24 for 3AH.
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