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Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

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Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#81

Post by panick21_ »

initplus wrote: post #53
jobigoud wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical applications that are only sending one data point per hour. It's limited to 750 packets per month.

Your hardware can record many datapoints, and bundle them up together into one packet for transmission in one big bundle. If you are reading a float off a sensor, you can get nearly 1 data point per minute, transmitted hourly, with a very naive implementation. Much more with compression specialized to your use case and clever packet design.

You can also aggregate some stuff on the sensor and the send the aggregations.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #14
arriu wrote: post #12

Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449. USD $5/MO PER DEVICE Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets

What might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?

It's ideal for asset tracking - you can fit a GPS fix, timestamp, and accuracy estimate (based on # of satellites visible) into 12 bytes, which is enough to ping once per minute and still only use half your allocated bandwidth. If your asset tags call in every 5 minutes or once per hour lots of options open up.

2 way communications aren't much more demanding because most of what you need can be done with lookup tables, and there aren't that many different commands you would need to send to an asset tag for local scanning. If you want to do person-to-person, 2 bytes per word is sufficient for a fairly large vocabulary (especially a tightly specified one like military brevity codes) - not exactly chatty but sufficient for many operational/emergency purposes.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#85

Post by NKosmatos »

Why isn’t this mandatory on ALL planes? A simple device like this (or similar ones) would make real-time tracking of all flights a reality.

We’ll see many new things and interesting technologies in the coming years, like this one and also the one in iPhones.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#86

Post by eternityforest »

arriu wrote: post #12

Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449. USD $5/MO PER DEVICE Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets

Sparkfun has evaluated boards for $149 although they are SparkX experimental and could go away.

Could always do a groupgets anyway.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#87

Post by eternityforest »

moralestapia wrote: post #61
wildzzz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to the minute sensor data for something so remote that it needs a satellite uplink is either going to be for something incredibly critical or totally overkill and a waste of money. With Swarm, you could be waiting up to 2 hours between passes that last anywhere between 10 and 50 minutes so it's not like you'll have your data instantly for large portions of the day.

Yes, but then IoT usually invokes a sense of (almost) real-time monitoring of things and lots of packets etc... But I get your point, also you can always do a lot of things to save on bandwidth, like do not send info which is not interesting (i.e. no point in sending 100s of "no fire was detected" messages). Btw, anyone here knows if there's compression schemes designed specifically for small data packets? Gzip and o…

Yeah and that's probably why IoT devs absolutely crank up the data rate and spew dozens of Bluetooth advertising packets in the air for no apparent reason, probably significantly reducing battery life that could have been 5yrs, for applications that really don't need instant response.

Something like msgpack might be able to compress ints to some degree since it can represent them as smaller data types.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#88

Post by LeafItAlone »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #14
arriu wrote: post #12

Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449. USD $5/MO PER DEVICE Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets

What might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?

A good use of IOT is agriculture. At proper cost, having satellite connected devices across huge sprawling farms would be extremely useful. There are already solutions, like LoRA, but these have their own disadvantages.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#89

Post by initplus »

moralestapia wrote: post #29
reaperducer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet) 144,000 bytes. Almost the capacity as a Commodore 1541 disk drive. 40 years ago it would have been unfathomable that a regular schmoe could transmit a floppy disk via satellite for just $5.

Sure, but 40 years have passed since then and 144K peanuts for any real world application. A quick example, you have a sensor that sends a single metric every minute. Suppose that you can pack that info (sensor id, metric type and data) in 32 bytes. You're looking at about 1.2MB/month of data (8 times your 144K), which will come to about $40/month. Quite expensive for a single data point, but I can imagine several us…

For use cases of this product you will be packing much tighter than this.

You get terminal identification from the carrier, no need to waste precious packet space on identifiers. And it's probably also a waste to encode field names into your packet - just record fields at the same offset every time. If 16 bits of precision is enough for you (it likely is) you can squeeze 16 metrics (or 16 time series recordings of the same metric) into every packet.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#90

Post by initplus »

NKosmatos wrote: post #85

Why isn’t this mandatory on ALL planes? A simple device like this (or similar ones) would make real-time tracking of all flights a reality. We’ll see many new things and interesting technologies in the coming years, like this one and also the one in iPhones.

ADS-B is essentially mandatory nowadays, but it's just a radio that transmits location to others in the same local area. Get enough volunteers with receivers spread throughout the world and you do get real time location tracking of every aircraft. See https://www.adsbexchange.com/
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