Massachusetts-based Blues Wireless has introduced Sparrow, a development kit for building LoRa-based applications.

For an IoT device to reach securely and reliably the internet means everything. The problem is, for a number of sensing devices, adding a costly wifi or cellular module isn’t tenable.

“If you’re looking to connect a set of smoke detectors in a facility, or a set of dispensers in a bathroom, adding a cellular or wifi module to every device is likely to result in a bill of materials [BoM] cost higher than that of the device itself,” said Brandon Satrom, vice president at Blues Wireless. “And while the data collected and insight gained from IoT devices are valuable, doubling your BoM just to get online is a non-starter for most.”

However, wifi and cellular aren’t the only options. Depending on range and the needs of the application, the likes of Bluetooth LE, Thread, Matter and LoRa exist to help lower the cost of connectivity for IoT devices.

“After we launched the Notecard in January 2021, we saw a lot of interest from customers who were impressed with our approach to simple, developer-friendly cellular IoT and wanted to explore how our products and approach to low-code IoT development could meet their needs,” said Satrom. “And as we explored use cases and the challenges our customers were facing, we saw an opportunity to extend our product offerings into places were a Notecard on every sensor wasn’t an option. Over the last year, we’ve been working to expand the reach of Blues products from cellular to wifi and, today, to LoRa.”

To meet this demand, the company has launched Sparrow, a developer toolkit that accelerates construction of low-cost, LoRa-based device cluster applications. the developer kit, which is available now, contains everything needed to build a proof of concept, including:

• A Notecarrier A and wifi Notecard.
• Two Sparrow reference sensors with onboard motion (PIR), temperature and humidity (BME280) in a ready-to-deploy enclosure.
• Three Sparrow Essentials boards to create the gateway and two for adding sensors.
• Batteries and cables for power and programming devices.

As an extension to the Blues ecosystem, Sparrow works with any Notecard.

“We provide a wifi Notecard to get you started, but a cellular Notecard works great too,” said Satrom. “You create a Sparrow gateway by connecting a Sparrow Essentials board to a Notecarrier using a Qwiic cable, and the pre-loaded firmware knows how to function as a gateway when it powers on and detects a Notecard.”

The two reference sensors help users deploy their first Sparrow app in minutes; plug in the included batteries, pair each with the gateway, and the sensors will start sending temperature, humidity and motion data to the Notecard and Notehub.io.

“And since Sparrow is meant to be a complete developer toolkit, we decided we wanted to go beyond the hardware and provide everything developers might need to explore the product,” said Satron. “That includes reference firmware, and software for a web-based dashboard application.”

On the hardware side, Blues has open-sourced the firmware that comes included on every Sparrow device, and has created guides at dev.blues.io to help users get started building Sparrow apps that read from their own sensors.

And on the software side, Blues is also releasing an open-source reference web app that provides a customisable dashboard for viewing Sparrow data, and configuring sensors. It has published a hosted version with some of its own sensors so users can see the app in action, and a complete set of instructions for creating and deploying the user’s own instance of the app, and routing Sparrow data from Notehub.io to their preferred cloud store.

“At Blues, we believe that LoRa is a great option for use cases where customers are looking to add connectivity to low-cost devices,” said Satrom. “And, with Sparrow, it’s never been easier to add developer-friendly LoRa connectivity to Notecard-based applications.”