Actinius is ready to release their Icarus LTE-M and NB-IoT development boards. The Icarus is based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 in a EU/US certified SiP package.
The board is laid out in the Adafruit Feather format, providing compatibility with dozens of add on boards (FeatherWings).
The specifications are super impressive:
- ARM® Cortex M33, 1 MB Flash, 256 kB RAM
- Nano SIM and Embedded SIM, LTE Cat-M1, LTE Cat-NB1 aka NB-IoT, Global coverage
And the board layout:
— USB (via FTDI UART Bridge)
— up to 18x General Purpose IO
— up to 6x 12-bit, 200 ksps ADC with EasyDMA
— up to 4x SPI master/slave with EasyDMA (can be mapped to any pin)
— up to 4x I2C master/slave with EasyDMA (can be mapped to any pin; 1 preconfigured for on-board I2C peripherals and default I2C pin headers)
— up to 4x UART (also with CTS/RTS) with EasyDMA (can be mapped to any pin; 1 preconfigured for on-board USB-UART Bridge)
— I2S (Inter-IC Sound Interface) with EasyDMADigital microphone interface (PDM) with EasyDMA (can be mapped to any pin)
— 4x pulse width modulator (PWM) unit with EasyDMA (can be mapped to any pin)
— Serial Wire Debug (SWD) on 6-pin TagConnect footprint on top side plus programming pads on bottom side
The board also has:
- GPS
- Low Power 3-axis accelerometer
- RGB LED
- General Purpose Button
- Reset Button
- Battery voltage reading, capable of very low power consumption
The website says:
3 Months of Free LTE-M Data
We provide Icarus with a free e-sim which has 10MB data to use for 3 months, so you can start testing your prototype immediately (only in supported countries).
Software
Actinius states the board runs @ZephyrIoT OS by default.
The company also states that they are considering a version with a Microchip SAMD processor also onboard. That would open it up to Arduino. (Hint: making a version which was subordinate to say, an Adafruit Feather M4 Express, would allow CircuitPython and communicate, say over SPI, to the Icarus would be AWESOME).
See the Actinius product page for more info and they are on Twitter at @Actinius_com.
Thanks for choosing the Feather board format! For all things Feather, see the Awesome Feather list!