LoRa has been combined with GPS in several products such as Rakwireless RAK811 LoRa tracker board, or Dragino LoRa/GPS HAT board among others, with all designed for far based on a LoRa module, plus a GPS module.
LoRa GPS tracker will soon even smaller as AcSiP has developed S76G and S78G systems-in-package (SiP) that combine LoRa, GPS and an MCU into a single 1.1 x 1.3cm package.
The two new modules are not listed on the company’s IoT-LoRa products page yet, but they appear to be an evolution of their S76S / S78S LoRa + MCU SiP released in 2016, so the new modules should have the following features:
- MCU – STMicro STM32L073x Arm Cortex M0+ MCU with up to 192 KB of Flash memory and 20 KB of RAM
- LoRa
- AcSiP S76G – Semtech SX1276 supporting global 868 MHz or 915 MHz ISM-Bands.
- AcSiP S78G – Semtech SX1278 supporting global 433 MHz or 470 MHz ISM-Bands
- GPS
- I/Os – I2C/SPI/UART/GPIO
- Package – 1.3 x 1.1 cm
The company will offers a complete SDK / HDK suite with latter likely similar to EK-S78S board pictured below but with an extra GPS antenna or connector.
AcSiP S76G / 78G SiP are expecting to be found in wearables, children and pets tracking and other applications. Availability and pricing has not been disclosed, but for reference their previous generation S76S and S78S chips are sold for respectively $20 and $18 (sample price for online purchase).
Via China Times
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
What’s the CPU in these like? Are we talking ATmega level, Cortex-M0, M4? From the intended use, I’d expect a low end Cortex-M0 level of CPU.
It says in the article:
MCU – STMicro STM32L073x Arm Cortex M0+ MCU with up to 192 KB of Flash memory and 20 KB of RAM
Interesting but if it really is $20 in single quality it’s pretty expensive.
The RAK811 are $10 each are very similar. The software on them isn’t amazing but it’s based on loramac-node so it’s possible to totally replace it without much hassle.
@dgp
I will need to go reboot my brain as it seems to have developed a memory leak.
Thanks for the refresher.
*sigh*