At last week’s Embedded World show in Nuremberg, Semtech was demonstrating LoRa Edge, a LoRa-based platform that will enable a wide portfolio of applications for indoor and outdoor asset management, targeting industrial, building, home, agriculture, transportation and logistics markets.
 
The first announcement from this portfolio is a geolocation product that changes the development of IoT devices for asset management applications, featuring low power wifi and GNSS sniffing capabilities combined with simple-to-use LoRa Cloud geolocation and device management services to reduce the cost and complexity of locating and monitoring IoT assets.
 
“We are going after the asset management market,” said Pedro Pachuca (pictured below), director of IoT wireless at Semtech. “LoRa Edge and LoRa Cloud geolocation services enable customers to develop ultra-low power applications for a variety of industries and will expand the mass adoption of LoRa in the IoT ecosystem.”

Over the next decade, 500 billion devices are expected to connect to the internet, according to Cisco, as organisations continue to shift towards a more IoT-focused business strategy, and the majority of those IoT devices require some form of localisation capability either at point of install or through the asset’s life.
 
The LoRa Edge geolocation platform will enable providers to leverage the localisation capabilities of LoRa as well as GNSS and wifi scanning capabilities from a single chip, allowing users to choose the best localisation tool for the application they are addressing.
 
By removing the need for incremental GNSS and wifi components, LoRa Edge reduces the costs of devices and design and procurement complexity. With the addition of LoRa Cloud geolocation services, providing TDOA, GNSS and wifi-based location calculation in the cloud to reduce device power requirements and improve asset management efficiency, LoRa Edge enables users to manage total cost of ownership, paying only when they need an asset to be located.
 
The key provisioning at point of manufacture and a secure join process further simplifies the development of IoT services.
 
“We don’t want people to hack in a trailer and see the location or change the destination,” said Pachuca. “We have a secure room in the device where customers can put the secure keys. We provision all the secure keys in the device so the customer does not have to do anything complex.”
 
The first LoRa Edge chipset targeted with geolocation (LR1110) is available and more products from this portfolio will be released in the first half of 2020.
 
“We are working with several customers who will bring products out within six months from now,” said Pachuca. “They can develop asset management products using different technologies as we are combining them into one.”
 
Power consumption has been kept down, he said, because the location information is calculated in the cloud rather than the device.
 
“The cloud does all the power hungry work,” he said. “The lowers the power consumption by around ten times compared with a traditional GPS or wifi device.”