MultiConnect® mDot™ EVB

LoRa Evalutaion and Development board -915MHz 

The MultiConnect® mDot™ EVB has been designed to help companies quickly determine if LoRa® is the right technology to solve key industrial IoT issues: how to effectively connect to, and manage, thousands of assets and sensors in the field to meet the cost, performance and strategic needs of the business.  The mDot EVB, which includes a MultiConnect® mDot™ RF module, enables users to rapidly create proof of concept applications to determine if LoRa can help companies solve the most difficult challenges in industrial IoT:

• *  Create LoRa proof of concepts to obtain sensor data (e.g., temperature, ambient light, electrical current and accelerometer) without the need for heavy configuration or embedded design skills
• *  Distance and obstruction penetration: measure your application’s performance against LoRa range capability:  up to 10 miles/15 km line of sight, 1-3 miles/2 km thru buildings*
• *  Extended Life – use your proof of concept to measure LoRa’s extremely low power draw which enables battery-powered assets to operate for years

The mDot EVB helps companies determine if their LoRa-based IoT applications solve the questions above by making it easy to obtain real-world LoRa performance from their proof of concepts.   With the click of a button, the mDot EVB provides a wealth of valuable information such as spreading factor, throughput, time and date activity and power level usage in your newly created IoT application.  Viewing and analyzing application performance data is easy thanks to the versatility of the mDot EVB which provides multiple ways of exporting data, including to the customer’s preferred Cloud platform.

The mDot EVB features an LCD display screen for displaying navigation information as well as network, test mode, GPS and sensor status data.  Two push button controls are also included providing menu navigation functions and two LEDs for displaying network and GPS status.  The mDot EVB also has several built in sensors including temperature, ambient light, pressure, electrical current and a 3-Axis accelerometer.  It comes with an on-board chip antenna to ease proof of concept development.  This versatile device can be used purely as a communications device or programmed with a custom application using the integrated ARM® mbed Enabled™ programmable MultiConnect mDot.  

Following the LoRa Alliance plan to ensure openness and interoperability, the mDot EVB was developed to work with LoRaWAN™ compliant gateways, including MultiTech’s MultiConnect® Conduit™, the industry’s most configurable, manageable, and scalable communications gateway.  

Extremely easy to use, customize and manage, the mDot EVB makes evaluating LoRa technology for IoT applications as easy as clicking a button.  

* Represents ideal network configuration and equipment set up.  Results vary depending on payload amount, transmission frequency, spreading factor used, as well as terrain, RF interference and obstruction type (e.g., metal, cement, etc.)

KEY BENEFITS

• Quickly develop and test LoRa proof of concepts without the need for heavy configuration or embedded design skills
• Measure LoRa distance and building penetration performance for line of sight or urban/obstructed use cases
• View LoRa IoT application data your way - in the Cloud, on the gateway or export directly to your laptop

FEATURES

• LCD screen displays menu options, test mode data as well as sensor data
• Flexibility to operate with any LoRaWAN 1.0 compliant gateway
• Supports both the European 868 MHz and North America 915 MHz ISM bands 

mDot EVB UserGuide:           mDot EVB UG.pdf