Environmental Asset Tracker Combines Cellular IoT and Bluetooth with a Five-Year Battery Life
January 23, 2020
News
The Meshtech Cloud Tracker is designed to prevent the compensation cost that is incurred in the supply of perishable goods.
Nordic Semiconductor announces that Norwegian asset tracking specialist, Meshtech, is employing both a Nordic multi-mode LTE-M/NB-IoT nRF9160 System-in-Package (SiP) and Nordic nRF52811 Bluetooth System-on-Chip (SoC) in environmental asset tracker to combine cellular IoT and Bluetooth wireless technologies with a five-year battery life (road mapped to 10 on the same tracker hardware).
Employing an ultra simple, ready-to-deploy design, the Meshtech Cloud Tracker continuously monitors the location and environmental condition of perishable goods, auto-provisions new trackers, auto-updates its firmware over-the-air, and leaves end customers with nothing more to do than simply select a cloud service provider to display collected location and sensor data for their particular application
In operation the Meshtech Cloud Tracker can not only continuously monitor environmental parameters such as temperature, but also whether a consignment has been dropped, tilted or folded, the location of individual shipping items (e.g. trolleys, pallets or boxes) within a consignment, the order in which they were loaded and unloaded, and the geographical location of the entire consignment anywhere in the world.
The Meshtech Cloud Tracker is designed for commercial and industrial perishable goods applications and is supplied in a ruggedized 113 x 110 x 19 mm package that weighs 194g, and features an in-built Hall Effect magnetic sensor, temperature sensor, and 3-axis accelerometer. The Cloud Tracker is powered by six internal 3.6V AA batteries and includes all necessary antennas (LTE and Bluetooth LE) and a pre-installed embedded SIM (eSIM) card that can operate globally.
The use of a Nordic nRF52811 SoC not only provides the Meshtech Cloud Tracker with the ability to communicate with other Bluetooth devices and specialist sensors, but also full native compatibility with other ultra-low-power wireless technologies such as Thread and Zigbee if required.
The multimode Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP has an integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and is certified for global cellular IoT applications. It has a dedicated 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor application processor, 1 MB Flash and 256 KB RAM memory, integrated RF front end, and is supplied in a compact 10 x 16 x 1 mm package. A range of analog and digital peripherals are also included, plus automated power and clock management, Arm TrustZone for execution, and Arm CryptoCell 310 for application layer security.
For more information, please visit: https://www.nordicsemi.com/
Tiera Oliver is the assistant managing editor at Embedded Computing Design. She is responsible for web content editing, product news, and story development. She also manages, edits, and develops content for ECD podcasts, including Embedded Insiders.
She utilizes her expertise in journalism and content management to oversee editorial content, coordinate with editors, and ensure high-quality output across web, print, and multimedia platforms. She manages diverse projects, assists in the production of digital magazines, and hosts company podcasts by conducting in-depth interviews with industry leaders to deliver engaging and insightful discussions.
Tiera attended Northern Arizona University, where she received her bachelor's in journalism and political science. She was also a news reporter for the student-led newspaper, The Lumberjack.
