Arduino, Thales Team Up for Portenta Cat M1/NB-IoT GNSS Shield — and It's MKR-Compatible, Too
Compatible with both the Portenta and MKR range as a carrier and built in partnership with Thales, this board manages up to 1.1Mbps.
Arduino has unveiled the result of a partnership with Thales on making it easier to develop always-connected and location-tracked Internet of Things (IoT) projects: the Portenta Cat. M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield add-on, compatible with both Portenta and MKR development boards.
The latest entry in the Arduino Pro Portenta family, which aims to offer development boards with double as designed-for-manufacturing modules ready to drop in to mass-produced products, the Portenta Cat. M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield does exactly what it says on the tin: provides any Portenta board with cellular network connectivity and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reception.
"By leveraging a Cinterion TX62 wireless module built for highly efficient, low-power IoT applications," claims the Arduino team, "the Portenta Cat. M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield delivers optimized bandwidth and performance, while adding global connectivity and positioning capabilities to Portenta and MKR boards."
The shield, which requires a host board to operate, includes compatibility with NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) Cat. M1/NB1/NB2 for data transfer at rates of up to 1.1Mbps upstream and 300kbps downstream as well as support for point-to-point mobile-terminated (MT) and mobile-originated (MO) Short Message Service (SMS) communications — plus Protocol Data Unit (PDU) mode.
The GNSS compatibility, meanwhile, covers all four of the major GNSS constellations currently available for civilian positioning: GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, and GLONASS. The board's footprint is given at 66×25.4mm (around 2.6×1") with an industrial-grade operating temperature of -40°C to +85°C (-104-185°F).
On the software side, the board comes with embedded IPv4 and IPv6 TCP/IP stack support, TCP server and client modes, UDP client, DNS client, ping support, HTTP client, FTP client, MQTT client, and support for secure connection with TLS or DTLS — plus a secure boot mode.
"The computational power of the Portenta H7 combined with the Portenta Cat. M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield greatly reduces the communication bandwidth requirements in IoT applications," the Arduino team notes of the board's potential. "The Portenta Cat. M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield is specifically designed for edge ML applications, enabling low-power, long-distance communications over NBIoT and CAT.M1 networks."
The shield is now available on the Arduino Store for $87.60, but will require a carrier board to operate. The Arduino Portenta H7 Lite is the cheapest in the family at $72 on top, or the shield can also be used with boards in the the MKR range starting at around $20.