I am looking for a board that can be easily integrated to HA with capability to use Galileo and GPS preferably and send it over cellular to my HA instance. I need about ten devices so paying a proprietary antitheft-kind solutions is not the way.
and soracom walter which seems to be it as the company has very cheap tarifs with sims for networks around the world but they dont sell to different EU countries than France, Germany, then UK and USA
Has anybody dealt with this problem and are there some out-of-the-box cheap solutions? Thanks
I’m the creator of the Walter module and although we are good friends with Soracom there is no SIM lock at all on Walter and you can use any IoT SIM card you like.
With Walter you have WiFi, BLE, LTE-M, NB-IoT and GNSS in a single, certified module. The GNSS is shared with the LTE radio to save power. This means that it is not a continuously tracking GPS because you must be in PSM mode or disconnected from cellular to do a fix. Because the GNSS is very low power it is a bit less sensitive than a dedicated module and you need to be outside for the GNSS to lock. If you are inside I would advise to use BLE or WiFi for tracking.
All info is on our website: https://www.quickspot.io and we also offer chat support via our discord channel.
Hi Daan,
thank you for your reply. Would you be so kind and provide me/us with more detailed step-by-step guide how to build it? Just some hints where to look could be fine.
My use case is to build a low power board that would track my ebike in case of theft. I will charge it by usbc from the ebike control unit and think about some small powerthrough powerbank as ups.
The easiest way for me is to build it on rapsberry pi, which I can tweak by some other sensors such as lte/gnss/vibration but the power draw is denying without buffy powerbank for which the bike frame does not provide me enough space. And finally it’s still a bike, so I do not want to make it heavier.
Sorry for the late reply. The Walter board comes pre-flashed with a tracker application that uploads data to our demo portal. This will get you started out-of-the box and it will allow you to evaluate the hardware without programming.
What I would do are these steps:
Make a nice casing and find a good spot to build-in Walter on your e-bike. Make sure the GPS antenna is not obstructed by metal (under the saddle for example).
Test if the reception is good and the SIM card works using the demo portal.
I would like to flash it with ESP Home and configure it myself. I need to attach the 18650 battery, accelerometer to detect movement, speaker for the alarm sound and CAN communicator to turn off/on the engine of the ebike. Do you provide basic documentation, so we can configure it with ESP Home and integrate it to home assistant?