In December 2024, Nordic Semiconductor launched the Nordic Thingy:91 X, an thrilling new addition to their Thingy household of speedy prototyping platforms for IoT purposes. The brand new battery-powered Thingy:91 X is an evolution of the unique Thingy:91, particularly designed to allow speedy improvement of prototypes for mobile IoT purposes, akin to asset monitoring and environmental monitoring.
Probably the most attention-grabbing–and admittedly understated–elements of the Thingy:91 X product launch is Nordic’s novel strategy to the standard improvement package “Getting Began” expertise. Gone are the times of spending hours putting in gigabytes of toolchains simply to blink an LED. As an alternative, simply pop in a SIM card, energy on the machine, and Bob’s your uncle – you possibly can blink an LED from the cloud!
Right here’s a hands-on have a look at first steps with the Thingy:91 X and a few ideas for subsequent steps on how one can get began creating your personal purposes for the machine.
{Hardware} overview
Thingies are meant to showcase Nordic’s flagship silicon and the Thingy:91 X is a first-rate instance of that philosophy–the board packs 5 completely different Nordic units right into a small handheld bundle!
On the coronary heart of the system is the nRF9151, a low-power mobile IoT System-in-Bundle (SiP) which helps LTE-M, NB-IoT, GNSS, and DECT NR+. The board additionally options Nordic’s nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 companion IC and the nRF5340 SoC that helps Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth mesh, NFC, Thread and Zigbee. Even the onboard energy administration is dealt with by Nordic nPM6001 and nPM1300 PMICs, which offer battery charging and gas gauging functionalities.
A sequence of on-board environmental monitoring and motion monitoring sensors allow speedy improvement of proof of idea (POC) IoT purposes early within the product improvement lifecycle. Not like typical improvement boards, the Thingy:91 X comes able to be deployed in real-world take a look at environments. The {hardware} has been designed to final for months and even years on the built-in LiPo battery and the PCB is protected by a tricky, splash-proof case.
Though the machine is designed to appear and feel like a product, it has all of the affordances that embedded builders would count on from trendy improvement {hardware}. Along with built-in USB and SWD connectors, the board additionally supplies a connector interface for an included breakout board, enabling hint debug and present measurement with Nordic’s Energy Profiler Equipment. It even consists of an I2C enlargement port for hooking up exterior boards suitable with the favored Qwiic and STEMMA QT ecosystems.
Connecting to nRF Cloud
With all of the {hardware} options packed into the Thingy:91 X, attending to a working proof of idea for an IoT product would possibly initially look like a frightening process. Even a easy IoT POC deployed within the area for testing requires the event of each firmware and cloud companies that assist machine administration, safe information transmission, and over-the-air updates. Previously, it might take weeks simply to get a tool like this sending fundamental sensor information to a cloud service.
Nordic has invested important effort into making it easy for brand spanking new customers to get their machine securely related to Nordic’s nRF Cloud in minutes, with out having to jot down a single line of code. The Thingy:91 X comes preloaded with customized firmware that routinely connects to hey.nrfcloud.com, a brand new browser-based software constructed on prime of nRF Cloud. Included SIM playing cards from Onomondo and Wi-fi Logic come pre-activated with 5-10 MB of information, enabling the machine to attach with none prior registration or activation.
Connecting a brand new Thingy:91 X to hey.nrfcloud.com is a straightforward three step course of:
- Insert the SIM card into the Thingy:91 X.
- Swap the facility swap to “ON”.
- Scan the QR code on the machine to open the machine’s administration web page.
That’s it!
As soon as the machine is related to the community, the web page routinely updates with real-time information despatched from the distant machine to nRF Cloud.
On the prime of the administration web page, some fundamental machine data is displayed: mobile community kind (LTE-M or NB-IoT), SIM vendor, information remaining on the SIM card, remaining battery life, in addition to temperature and air high quality indicators. There’s even a small widget for setting the colour of the onboard LED.
A historic graph view reveals machine utilization metrics during the last hour, day, week, or month. This view additionally demonstrates an integration with Memfault that shows current machine reboots throughout the similar graph.
Extra detailed machine administration configuration and metadata is displayed on the backside of the machine administration web page. This consists of the firmware model data utilized by the nRF Cloud firmware-over-the-air (FOTA) replace service for wi-fi firmware replace.
Location monitoring
The Thingy:91 X is a perfect platform for prototyping asset monitoring purposes, and hey.nrfcloud.com features a built-in interactive map for real-time location monitoring out of the field.
A number of complementary location monitoring strategies are supported:
- GNSS
- Wi-Fi
- Mobile (single-cell and multi-cell)
Every of the supported location monitoring strategies supplies a special tradeoff between location accuracy and the facility consumed by the machine.
GNSS locationing is probably the most correct technique, offering meters of accuracy, but it surely has the best energy consumption. Usually, the time it takes a GPS modem to get a repair on a gaggle of satellites from a cold-start will be on the order of minutes, rapidly draining valuable battery life. Nevertheless, by utilizing Assisted- and Predicted-GPS (A-GPS and P-GPS) companies supplied by Nordic’s nRF Cloud Location Providers, the Thingy:91 X can discover the satellites in simply seconds, drastically decreasing the time required to acquire a exact location.
In instances the place a GPS sign will not be accessible–for instance, when the machine is positioned indoors – an alternate location technique makes use of Wi-Fi to scan for close by SSIDs and ship them to nRF Cloud the place they’re matched towards a Wi-Fi database to find out location. Whereas solely efficient in populated areas, WiFi-based locationing can present tens of meters of accuracy on a a lot decrease energy price range than GNSS-based positioning.
Lastly, the machine will be positioned by periodically sending details about close by cell towers to nRF Cloud, the place the situation is calculated utilizing a database of cell tower places. This may be accomplished utilizing simply the only cell tower the machine is related to (SCELL), or by scanning for neighboring cell towers to calculate a extra correct location (MCELL). Mobile-based locationing is the bottom energy and least correct, offering lots of or hundreds of meters of accuracy.
This capacity to seamlessly swap between a mix of location monitoring strategies permits the Thingy:91 X to dynamically trade-off accuracy towards battery life in probably the most optimum means for every software.
Subsequent steps
If you happen to’ve simply acquired your first Thingy:91 X, hey.nrfcloud.com is by far the simplest option to get the machine related to the cloud and experiment with the {hardware} capabilities. Nevertheless, sooner or later you’ll want to leap out of the sandbox and begin creating your personal software for the Thingy:91 X.
Listed here are some assets and ideas that will help you get began.
First, head to nordicsemi.com/start-thingy91x and comply with the directions to put in the nRF Join for Desktop software onto your PC. The included “Fast Begin” software will stroll you thru the method of programming the machine with a pair pre-compiled pattern purposes.
For instance, the nRF Cloud multi-service software will mean you can consider a number of companies supplied by the complete nRF Cloud: machine onboarding, information assortment, FOTA updates, location, logging, and alerts.
If you’re prepared to begin writing your personal software for the Thingy:91 X, make sure that to take a look at the Nordic Developer Academy. The academy supplies free self-paced coaching on the basics of utilizing the nRF Join SDK to develop Zephyr RTOS-based IoT purposes. There are extra coaching modules protecting Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and mobile IoT fundamentals.
Lastly, if you wish to find out how Nordic constructed the hey.nrfcloud.com firmware and cloud software, the supply code is printed as a set of repositories on GitHub.
Now that you know the way to get began, go construct one thing cool with the Thingy:91 X!
