This was not a difficult decision. When ipXchange first encountered this board, we cursed that we don’t have the in-house resources to build our own development board for engineers.
Everything about this board aligns with what we would want from an ipXchange-own product: it’s compact, it features several technologies from manufacturers we love, it’s from a passionate start-up, it’s IoT oriented, it reduces time and cost of product development, and it even has an on/off switch.
ipXchange’s overall best discovery of 2023 is Conexio’s Stratus IoT development board, so a huge congratulations to their team, especially Rajeev Piyare, for his ipXperience interview and hard work making a device that ticks all the boxes, as ipXchange has previously stated in our writings about Stratus.
With an AI-capable Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP at the heart of the build, you know you’re in good hands for cellular and GNSS connectivity for a global marketplace – and yes, it does support this out of the box with automatic carrier switching – with the soon-to-be-released Stratus PRO featuring the new nRF9161 SiP for additional private 5G mesh networking and 95% worldwide coverage. This out-of-the-box connectivity comes with 500 MB of data valid for 10 years without SIM lock-in. Marvellous!
And that’s not all. Stratus has onboard environmental and motion sensors to get you started with your application development, in addition to 2 buttons for building a simple user interface, and standard interfaces and 26 mixed-signal GPIOs to add your choice of peripherals to this already strong heart.
AND that’s not all! Stratus can run autonomously on harvested solar energy, charging a LiPo battery thanks to an e-peas AEM10941 PMIC. It even has an on/off switch to hard-disconnect the power during development or product transportation, meaning that you don’t have to remove the battery and wear out the connector.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL! This board ships with a carrier as part of the development kit for easy connection to popular third-party boards that you may already be using during development – such as MikroBUS and Qwiic – as well as a solar energy harvester.
AND! THAT’S! NOT—
You get the picture. Stratus is a masterpiece of the development board world, and with new products coming for 2024, Conexio is the startup that you should be watching. Learn more about Stratus by following the link to the board page, and if you’re working on a cellular IoT device, fill out that form and put Conexio on the map with a product that can go global.
That’ll do it for 2023. We’ll see you bright and breezy in 2024. Enjoy the holidays if you have them, and as always…
Keep designing!