It is a kind of love story, but a bit strange,
between two little modules that wanted a change.
The Move-X MAMWLE radio module with LoRaWAN connectivity
was popular, famous, and leading successful activities.
Everyone loved its high-computational chipset,
nevertheless, he was not completely happy yet.
Then he met the u-blox MAX-M10S with GNSS technology
with a cloud-based positioning for large power autonomy.
It was love at first sight:
they started spending together every day and night.
Their combination
is perfect for power-constrained IoT applications.
They are a perfect match:
one has long-range wireless connectivity
the other one can meter-level track.
Their love has already gained fame:
Cicerone is its name.
The release campaign of the Cicerone development board by Move-X was filled with this kind of content: an unconventional way to announce an unconventional development board!
The solution is designed for tracking applications that require meter-level accuracy and long-range LoRaWAN connectivity.
However, in order to really understand Cicerone and the modules that compose it, we need to take a step backward.
Move-X was born as an R&D division of Move Solutions, an Italian company focused on developing Structural Health Monitoring Systems for civil infrastructures and using IoT devices with LoRa technology. However, a few years ago, Move Solutions realized that the modules that they were using in their devices weren’t powerful enough to develop all the features that they wanted to bring to that market.
That’s the reason why they decided to design their own module, the MAMWLE. That was the beginning of Move-X, a company that now supports organizations worldwide in designing low-power intelligent Internet of Things systems… all thanks to that small, but powerful module.
The MAMWLE is a low-power, LoRaWAN-compliant radio module based on STM32WLEx microcontroller by STMicroelectronics. Powered by a powerful 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 with clock frequency up to 48MHz and paired with up to 64kB SRAM and 256kB Flash, it is suitable for most IoT applications.
In a quest for ultra-low-power IoT applications, many of today’s IoT project designers choose LoRaWAN® network technology.
Well, there are many reasons!
It offers an efficient, flexible and cost-effective solution to real-world problems in rural and indoor use cases, where Cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks are ineffective.
Example:
Take the case of agriculture and livestock tracking: LoRaWAN low-data rate (between 0.3 kbit/s and 5 kbit/s, depending on the distance between end nodes and gateways) is ideal for agriculture sensors that only need to transmit information ever so often. In addition, LoRaWAN’s ability to communicate wirelessly over large distances (up to 10km in rural areas) is a great fit for these narrowband applications.
But smart tracking has great market potential even outside an agricultural context and organizations around the world are implementing tracking and positioning solutions to achieve the following objectives:
A traditional standard precision GNSS module delivers meter-level accuracy, but it can be quite power-hungry. Thanks to the cloud-based positioning of the MAX-M10S by u-blox, IoT project designers won’t have to make any trade-off decisions anymore, picking between bandwidth, location accuracy, energy consumption, and device size. The Cicerone board, integrating the MAMWLE LoRa® module and the Max-M10S answers the power autonomy imperative: it is the perfect match for powered-constrained IoT applications that require long-range wireless connectivity, but also meter-level accuracy.
Another big plus? Cicerone’s compatibility with all Arduino MKR form factor shields and with Arduino IDE gives the possibility to quickly build complex IoT solutions in a small form factor.
Mind-blowing, isn’t it?
So, we now have a board that can tell you everything about asset tracking and positioning and it is able to collect much other information depending on the needs of specific applications.
What are we going to call it?
Cicerone is the Italian name for Cicero.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43 B.C.) was renowned in Rome as a statesman, lawyer, and writer, and he is remembered today for his skills as an orator and rhetorician. It was Cicero's eloquence and knowledge that influenced the use of his Italian name, Cicerone, to refer to sightseeing guides, themselves known for their knowledge, and later, to persons who serve as mentors or tutors to others.
So, when Move-X was looking for a name for an (Italian) development board that gave clients access to much information about asset location and the surrounding environment, they thought that naming it Cicerone would simply be… perfect!
