HOW DOES IT WORK?

LR IoT Click is based on the LR1110, a long-range, ultra-low power transceiver from Semtech Corporation designed to enhance LoRa®-based geolocation applications. This platform solution supports LoRa® and (G)FSK modulations for LPWAN use cases over the active 868/915MHz ISM band antenna, which Mikroe also offer. The LR1110 also features a low-power multi-band front-end that can acquire several signals of opportunity for geolocation purposes (802.11b/g/n WiFi AP MAC addresses, GNSS (GPS, BeiDou) satellites signals) and then transmit them using LPWAN network to a geolocation server, which computes the position of the object. This Click board™ is optimized for low-power applications requiring indoor and outdoor geolocation, such as asset location, traceability, loss and theft prevention, asset recovery, and inventory management.

The LR1110 uses three operating modes: WiFi passive scanning and two GNSS modes for outdoor geolocation, such as GNSS autonomous and assisted modes. With WiFi passive scanning, the LR1110 can discover the WiFi b/g/n access points available in the vicinity of the device and extract MAC addresses to geolocate them. The objective is to obtain at least 2 MAC addresses and position the device after being sent to an online WiFi lookup service. The WiFi passive scanning implemented in LR1110 can also extract the country code information of an access point contained in the beacon or probe response.

In addition to WiFi, there is also a fast and low-power GNSS scanner which, with an active GNSS antenna from our offer, captures a short portion of the signal broadcast by the GNSS satellites and extracts the information required to calculate the device position. This information is then aggregated into a NAV message which can be sent to a back-end system to compute the device position. As mentioned before, the GNSS scanner has two modes of operation: autonomous and assisted. In autonomous mode, which does not require any assistance data, the LR1110 searches and decodes the signal from the strong satellites for indoor/outdoor detection, while in the assisted mode, allows searching for all the visible satellites and also requires connectivity with the geolocation server for calculation of the device position.

This Click board™ communicates with an MCU through a standard SPI interface supporting the most common SPI mode, SPI Mode 0, with a maximum frequency of 16MHz. It also possesses an interrupt pin, routed to the INT pin of the mikroBUS™ socket, allowing the host MCU to react to special events in the LR1110 system without register-poll. A "BUSY" indicator, labeled as BSY and routed to the PWM pin of the mikroBUS™ socket, indicating that the internal MCU can't receive any commands from the host MCU, and general reset function routed on the RST pin of the mikroBUS™ socket as well as on the onboard RESET button. It also uses two LED indicators labeled STAT1 and STAT2 for optional GNSS and WiFi network-activity status visual indications. Still, they can also be configured according to the wishes and needs of the user himself.

NOTE: Users can enrich its asset management application by combining this Click board™ and Semtech's LoRa Edge™ Tracker platform, which efficiently processes information such as GNSS RAW data and WiFi MAC addresses. Thanks to the Quick Start Guide, all info from setting your device to final service connections is available free of charge.

This Click board™ can be operated only with a 3.3V logic voltage level. The board must perform appropriate logic voltage level conversion before using MCUs with different logic levels. However, the Click board™ comes equipped with a library containing functions and an example code that can be used as a reference for further development.

SPECIFICATIONS