OpenThread Mesh Gateway with BG95-M3 based LTE-M support

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2021-06-14 10:00:06

I guess Ray Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns" also applies to small-scale prototype development. My experience has certainly been that the more stuff you build, the faster you can build new stuff - even on a relatively small scale.

I made the GT-004, which is a breakout board for the Quectel BG95-M3 LPWA module a few months back. Except for the Skyworks LNA, and the added support for a wider IO voltage range tolerance it is more or less identical to the Quectel reference design.

GT-004 is intended to be used as a module for enabling rapid IoT prototyping on popular platforms, like the Arduino, the ESP32, or the Raspberry Pi.

From a design perspective, it can also be considered as a functional block that can be added to other, more specialized designs that need support for NB-IoT/LTE-M connectivity.

After the GT-004 exercise, I had the opportunity to play around with and familiarize myself with OpenThread for a couple of weeks. This is an open-source implementation of the Thread mesh protocol (released by Google).