Embedded Experience: Espotel LoRa platform now released

I'm most proud to announce that the ARM mbed enabled LoRa prototyping platform from Espotel is now officially published and live at ARM mbed platforms site. The purpose of the platform is to enable rapid prototyping and small scale piloting, and serve as reference design for development of full custom products.

Espotel LoRa platform at ARM mbed.

ARM mbed is software platform for embedded devices. It provides drivers and hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and development environment in cloud hosted by ARM. For professional development it is possible to install the compiler and software version control system on your own server and still benefit from the software provided by ARM.

At the moment there are 9 silicon vendors, 23 hardware platform vendors, and 71 boards listed in the public mbed catalog, and the number is increasing. mbed is similar to the popular Arduino in the sense that it enables easy start of embedded software development for prototyping, evaluation, hobby and eductional purposes. Unlike Arduino, mbed is also good for professional use and mass-production. And it provides support for much wider selection of silicons and boards.

Arduino form-factor is sort of de-facto standard among many prototyping boards, including ST Nucleo, Freescale FRDM, NXP LPCxpresso and many more. This makes it possible to use any Arduino-compatible extension shields from 3rd party vendors, including sensors and interface boards.

Special feature in Espotel platform is double Arduino headers for both master and slave use. It can be used either as LoRa interface shield for external MCU board, having application software and protocol stack running in separate MCUs, or as master with both application and protocol stack integrated and running in the same MCU. In both cases other extension shields can be used as well.

LoRaWAN compliant software stack with example applications is available as open source via the mbed web site. The LoRaWAN implementation is based on IBM LMIC distributed by Semtech. The board is confirmed to inter-operate with Multitech and Kerlink LoRa gateways, and it can be also used in point-to-point mode with LoRaMAC layer.