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FiPy - The World’s First 5-Network IoT Development Board

2016-12-12 | By Maker.io Staff

Wireless Bluetooth / BLE Wifi

We have seen many new IoT hardware throughout 2016 all specialising in a single IoT network not including WiFi/Bluetooth SoC. Now there is a new IoT development board featured on Kickstarter like most other development boards, which includes the ability to interconnect to 5 different types of wireless technologies programmed in microPython – FiPy.

The FiPy was developed by pycom.io who brought us the WiPy 2.0 WiFi and Bluetooth development board based on the latest ESP32 SoC. They have slowly expanded their range of wireless development boards with the LoPy LoRa wireless board and the SiPy Sigfox wireless board which shipped in November 2016.

Whether it’s a monitoring, managing or a controlling application, and whether you want to use LoRa, Sigfox, cellular LTE-M, WiFi, or Bluetooth to network, the FiPy does it all for you.

Specification

Features on the Top of the FiPy Board

Figure 1: Features on the Top of the FiPy Boardcomputer

Features on the Bottom of the FiPy Board

Figure 2: Features on the Bottom of the FiPy Boardcomputer

  • Processing:
    • Espressif ESP32 SoC
    • Dual processor and WiFi+Bluetooth radio system on chip
    • Network processor handles the WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity and network stacks
    • Main processor is entirely free to run the user application
    • An extra ULP-coprocessor that can monitor GPIOs, the ADC channels and control most of the internal peripherals during deep-sleep mode while only consuming 25uA
    • Hardware floating point acceleration on both cores
    • Python multi-threading
    • RTC running @ 32KHz
  • Interfaces:
    • 2 x UART, 2 x SPI, 2 x I2C, I2S, micro SD card
    • Analog channels: 8x12 bit ADCs, 2x8 bit DAC
    • 2x64 bit Timers
    • PWM with up to 16 channels
    • DMA on all peripherals
    • Up to 22 GPIO pins
  • Mechanical:
    • Size: 55 x 20 x 3.5 mm
    • Operating temperature: -40 to 85 degrees Celsius
    • WS2812 RGB multi-colour LED
    • U.FL LoRa/Sigfox antenna connector
    • U.FL Cellular antenna connector
    • WS2812 RGB LED
    • Reset switch
    • Internal WiFi/Bluetooth antenna

With all the technology out there in the market and every IoT organisation claiming to be the best at this and that it can be difficult to choose a technology to suit your needs especially if you prototyping for a future product. This is where the FiPy comes into its prime, it allows users to easily prototype different types of technology and hopefully implement a solution that fits into their projects.

Be sure to check out their Kickstarter campaign which still has a long way to go yet. It is definitely going to be an interesting piece of IoT hardware and hopefully a very useful tool.

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