While exhibiting at Embedded World, ipXchange was given a business card with a small picture of a board on it, printed to scale at 20 x 24.5 mm, from a company called Onethinx. They recommended we check them and their LoRa + Bluetooth product out, so with a break in video content, the time has come, and we are very impressed at what Onethinx has to offer.
The idea is simple: Onethinx Core is a LoRaWAN + Bluetooth 5 LE module with an on-board antenna and a powerful pair of MCU cores (Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M0+ within an Infineon PSoC6) to support your battery-operated IoT device – the current consumption goes as low as 15 µA/MHz for the M0+ core. These are all very nice specifications, but not necessarily something that sets the module apart from competing devices, so what makes the Onethinx Core so special?
In short, Onethinx believes that by choosing their device for your design, you could save development cost by up to five times and development time by more than 50 times when compared to creating a similar connectivity device from scratch. This is because Onethinx Core comes pre-certified for RED and LoRa Alliance, the RF design is done for you to produce high efficiency communication with optimised range and reduced power consumption, and the use of a PSoC6 basis for the module means that additional components are not required for interfacing sensors. In addition to this, Onethinx Core is protected by an embedded secure element for end-to-end encryption so your IoT device will be safe from attack, without the need for additional security components.
All four of these design challenges present hurdles for monetary and time costs within a design cycle, and Onethinx has addressed these in full while simultaneously reducing component count. Should you decide to partner with Onethinx, they will also offer their own design expertise to help you integrate Onethinx Core into your product so that you get the full benefit of their efforts to ease IoT design. Is it even worth mentioning that the Cortex-M4 core will flawlessly run FreeRTOS or Mbed OS should your application require it?
Learn more about Onethinx Core and its demokit by following the link to our board page, where you can also apply to test the technology for use in a commercial project.
Keep designing!