I would think that LoRa, with similar footprint and bandwidth, would be a better adder for hobby boards, as you could own both ends of the system and not have to interface with a third-party (SigFox), 2-years subscription included not withstanding.
LoRa is in the pipeline but it requires you to either setup your own gateways or join somebody else's network ($$). SigFox is setting up networks globally and this board also comes with geolocation included in the subscription. So if you want to make a low power sensor node that works now this is s good product
Might be a very newbie question, but is there something like this for WiFi? I mean, something that like SigFox can run "6 months on 2 AA batteries" for WiFi for Arduino?
EDIT: I meant the same amount of data as with Sigfox, i.e. about 10K a day (specifically I just want to fetch some local weather data basically, maybe some traffic data as well).
6 months might be way too long for WiFi. A lot of factors come into place to achieve at least one month. Just to mention the most obvious is the frequency of data transfer.
WiFi is far too power hungry for that, AFAIK. However the Arduino itself (rather the Atmel AVR chip that powers it) should definitely be capable of running months at a time on batteries, with proper programming.
The article says it comes with a 2-year subscription for upto 140 messages per day.
I can see this being useful for collecting field data of sorts, but unfortunately probably only in select urban areas. Coverage outside a few major cities is spotty or nonexistent.
Little reason to run anything other than ubiquitous Wi-Fi imho.
You can run an ESP8266 or ESP32 chip, or the Realtek RTL8710 chip which is $2 from Pine64, and probably have enough input and output pins to do the job.
I agree with you for the IoT devices I would create in my life, as I am around WiFi in all of those cases (home, office, etc). However for sensor networks in rural areas this would be a great solution. For example, the water reservoirs where I live report live statistics to a server and I can see in real time what the levels of them are (along with other data, like rainfall, temperature, etc). There's no WiFi in the backcountry!
Wifi has an incredibly limited range compared to these technologies. You'd need a repeater every dozen meters or so, which means running power to all of those repeaters. Meanwhile SigFox can run up to 50km. That's a huge reason to run SigFox instead of wifi.
With your reasoning, we might as well take down all the cell phone towers and just make calls over wifi, wifi is everywhere right?
WiFi is not exactly ubiquitous and it requires an infrastrucutre which is short range by definition. It's also power hungry. If your use case is to place several sensors in a vineyard without having to replace batteries every day you want something like sigfox. Your arguments works if you're a hobbyist hacking together a diy solution (i.e. you value your time 0 dollars) but if you're a company or a more professional user you might value the fact that this works out of the box, is well supported and manufactured to last in the field.
SigFox and wifi aren't really comparable at all. SigFox is ultra low power, ultra long range (up to 50km, they claim) and sends only 12 bytes of data per message.
I'm curious what the fundamental underlying tech is that is driving Lora and Sigfox? E.g. cdma has a few core ideas that make the magic work. What is the equivalent fundamental concept that is driving the low-power, long-range, low-bw communication?
* Low data rate (100 bits/s in Europe, at 14dBm/25mW) + lightweight protocol
* High receiver sensitivity, mostly SDR based
We've got a few youtube videos explaining this ... but mostly targeted for a generic audience.
The "radio signal modulation" may have enough tech details to match what you're looking for : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvM6KEDIdE&index=6&list=PLc...
We're also working on a publication of a standard UNB IoT protocol, Sigfox being one of its implementations.
Should come within a few weeks.
[+] [-] Raed667|9 years ago|reply
I have also worked with LoRa and wrote a blog post comparing working with both networks: https://raed.it/blog/iot-network-sigfox-vs-lora/
[+] [-] 1001101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbanzi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbmorgado|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: I meant the same amount of data as with Sigfox, i.e. about 10K a day (specifically I just want to fetch some local weather data basically, maybe some traffic data as well).
[+] [-] ecoqba11|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yomansat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|9 years ago|reply
I can see this being useful for collecting field data of sorts, but unfortunately probably only in select urban areas. Coverage outside a few major cities is spotty or nonexistent.
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|9 years ago|reply
You can run an ESP8266 or ESP32 chip, or the Realtek RTL8710 chip which is $2 from Pine64, and probably have enough input and output pins to do the job.
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
You pretty much cannot do this with WiFi due to power usage.
[+] [-] Ductapemaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
With your reasoning, we might as well take down all the cell phone towers and just make calls over wifi, wifi is everywhere right?
[+] [-] mbanzi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yomansat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trapperkeeper79|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolsc|9 years ago|reply
* Ultra Narrow Band (100Hz) modulation
* Low data rate (100 bits/s in Europe, at 14dBm/25mW) + lightweight protocol
* High receiver sensitivity, mostly SDR based
We've got a few youtube videos explaining this ... but mostly targeted for a generic audience. The "radio signal modulation" may have enough tech details to match what you're looking for : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvM6KEDIdE&index=6&list=PLc...
We're also working on a publication of a standard UNB IoT protocol, Sigfox being one of its implementations. Should come within a few weeks.
There is a draft about the network architecture here : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zuniga-lpwan-sigfox-s...
[+] [-] aplomb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolsc|9 years ago|reply
So far, you have solid coverage in some metro areas only : SF/North Bay, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, Houston (Miami & others are getting there)
Check out sigfox.com/coverage to get insights on the current production coverage (Sorry for the colours ...)