In the second of what we hope to be many in-person interviews at the ipXchange studios, Eamon chats with David Evans from Robustel, who came to show us the R1511P embedded 4G/LTE router.
We filmed two interviews with David, and in this first sit-down chat, Eamon and David discuss what Robustel brings to the design engineering table before providing an overview of the embedded 4G router board itself.
As David explains, Robustel’s focus is mainly cellular and LoRaWAN connectivity, serving a broad range of applications from transportation to digital signage, medical devices, EV charging and more – the IoT is vast! While Robustel’s main product base consists of modems in the traditional housing that one would expect to find on your home Wi-Fi router, the R1511P embedded 4G/LTE router presents a bare-board solution that can be directly integrated into an end product, or installed into a building’s fuse box, for example. The board itself is pre-certified to be used in this way for space-constrained deployments.
The R1511P board is built around a Quectel module and features dual ethernet ports and three antenna connections to serve various cellular protocols (2G/3G/4G), as well as 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi connectivity. There is also a connector for RS232, RS485, or digital output, depending on the engineer’s preference. This flexibility is especially useful when retrofitting the R1511P into existing products and infrastructure.
While the board itself is an impressive module that saves development time, the key differentiator that Robustel offers is the Linux-based RobustOS that runs the communication operations on the device. This and the Microsoft Azure-based cloud platform, RMCS – which enables scalable remote management of devices – means that designers do not need to build software to support their application. This is in direct contrast to simply buying wireless modules and doing the whole design and system integration yourself.
David also recognises that there are economic factors to consider when choosing whether to build your own cellular modem or to use Robustel’s ready-to-go solution. Since Robustel buys more than 250,000 cellular modules each year, significant savings can be passed onto the customer, especially for smaller-volume projects (0-10k units).
We’ll be delving further into those last points in our second video, so for now, learn more about Robustel’s R1511P embedded 4G/LTE router by following the link to the board page below, where you can also apply to evaluate this technology for use in a commercial application.
Keep designing!
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