Watch our recorded webinar with Digi International’s Senior OEM Product Manager, Alec Jahnke, for an informative Tech Talk on how our suite of XBee® modules, gateways, and tools can enhance your connectivity and accelerate your IoT application development.
In this presentation, Digi XBee expert Alec Jahnke provides a technical overview on accelerating your IoT development with the Digi XBee Ecosystem. He covers strategies for effectively connecting to diverse products, explores various XBee applications, and discusses the essential building blocks for establishing a remote monitoring system.
To learn more, explore the comprehensive capabilities of the Digi XBee ecosystem by visiting our Digi XBee RF Modules, Digi XBee Gateways, or Digi XBee Cellular Modems pages.
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Follow-up Webinar Q&A
In our recent webinar on building a remote monitoring system with Digi IoT gateways, Alec Jahnke, Phil De Carlo and Corey Brenner had an excellent discussion, and the questions and answers provided additional insight. See the Q&A session below. If you have additional questions, be sure to reach out.
Hosts:
- Corey Brenner, Channel Marketing Manager, Digi International
- Philip De Carlos, Senior Field Application Engineer, Digi International
Presenter:
- Alec Jahnke, OEM Solutions Senior Product Manager, Digi International
Alec, you mentioned that Digi Remote Manager® can act as the gathering point for the data and forward it on to other systems. Can Digi RM also alert based on incoming sensor data as well?
Alec: Yeah. That is absolutely correct. It can. So, Digi Remote Manager, here, I'll go over to it quickly. It actually has a series of alerts that can be set up, and they can alert on all your standard things, as new data comes in. It can alert as it goes above or below, or within a certain range. You can create those alerts and use them to do a series of different things. Typically, it will work within the Digi Remote Manager platform itself, but we also have the option to send those alerts via either email or cellular text message. So, if you wanted to set that up with Digi Remote Manager, you could also create those type of alerts as well.
What is the maximum bandwidth appropriate for Digi XBee® solutions?
Alec: Sure. So, that's a good question. And I think the beauty of the answer here is we can support many different bandwidths, typically LTE-M/NB-IoT bandwidth is on the lower side. That's typically somewhere around 200 to 500 kilobytes per second, depending upon whether you're on an LTE-M network or an NB-IoT network. But then, as we move up within that same form factor, you could put on an LTE Cat 1 module, which can go up to about 10 megabytes per second download and 5 megabytes per second upload, all the way to our newest product that is getting released here shortly, Digi XBee LTE Cat 4, which can support speeds of up to about 300 megabytes per second. So, it really covers a wide spectrum, and we can really fit your needs, depending upon your use case.
You mentioned edge intelligence. Can you talk about what options there are for actually working with the sensor data locally, at the site, rather than sending it back to Digi RM and the back end?
Alec: Yeah, sure. So, we enable edge intelligence via MicroPython onboard the XBee. We actually have another microprocessor on board, that's separate from the cellular module itself, where you can do some of these calculations. And basically, anything that you could do in Python, you can do in MicroPython. The biggest difference is there's less space for storage, but in general, if you wanted to run equations to take things from an input sensor value, and equate it to an actual engineering value, kind of like we're showing here in the XBee Sensor Lab, you can do that.
You could also do what I would refer to as kind of interrogating data. Taking a sensor value, just for simplicity's sake, if we say a digital I/O, the value is going to be one or zero. You could take that reading periodically, and you could only store and send that data when that value actually changes. So, you could configure it to just send on change.
This is just a couple of the small things that can be done. We have a series of different examples on digi.com, or our XBee MicroPython GitHub site , where we have a number of different examples there, such as enabling some of the Bluetooth Low Energy applications. We also use MicroPython to enable and pull for Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, for instance, and Bluetooth sensor values within MicroPython as well. So, really, anything that you could do generally, in order to kind of key in on that data, make and change that data, as well as interrogate that data, are all options that are at your disposal.