Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

nns.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 212 posts

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#13

Post by Tuna-Fish »

captainmuon wrote: post #9

The Quectel modems are fun parts. We are using one in a project as a kind of theft protection. I couldn't belive at first "this is a whole computer with Linux on it". I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. Is it for regulatory reasons, to protect their secret sauce, or for our convenience? On the one hand it makes simple things really easy with some AT commands, on th…

Regulatory reasons. There are a lot of things that FCC regs say that devices that transmit either must or must not do, which made more sense back when everything was analog. Now that the device is a full computer and can be programmed to do whatever you want, the way the industry has decided to best fulfill all those requirements is to make the computer do exactly and only what is required and then lock it down into a black box.

If you just unlocked everything, it would probably be better at what it does, but it would also not be possible to sell to consumers.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#15

Post by asadhaider »

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz."

You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs.

[0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#16

Post by scoutt »

captainmuon wrote: post #9

The Quectel modems are fun parts. We are using one in a project as a kind of theft protection. I couldn't belive at first "this is a whole computer with Linux on it". I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. Is it for regulatory reasons, to protect their secret sauce, or for our convenience? On the one hand it makes simple things really easy with some AT commands, on th…

> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much.

The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc.

It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point.

BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#18

Post by fouc »

asadhaider wrote: post #15

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz." You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs. [0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#20

Post by oblio »

fouc wrote: post #18
asadhaider wrote: post #15

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz." You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs. [0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-)

My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

Post reply on HN