The first one is always free. Here's the actual pricing.[1]
There's a free tier limited to 5,000 events/month. The "Deploy" tier is
$5,389.20 per project/year, plus event charges, plus a "connectivity assurance" charge.
Still, you could get a lot done with the free tier if you didn't overdo the traffic. Every half hour, "Soda machine #5621, no alarms, outside temp 82F, inside temp 36F, cash $75.25, stock level for Diet Pepsi 4, stock level for Sprite 50..."
I think it's not so much that meta is discouraged as much as knee-jerk emotional meta reactions are, because they rarely lead to useful discussion. Complaining about downvotes or that you think the mods are being unfair are ultimately selfish actions most the time that drag the rest of the discussion down. At the same time, people sharing some of their favorite "HN discussion brought amazing person to the fore that shared" moments and links to them has allowed me and others to revisit and share in those moments and learn some of those amazing things shared even though we weren't part of that discussion.
Yes, you are correct. I am responsible for the messaging on blues.io and I agree with you, we could do a better, more full job explaining.
We are working through the final elements of a website revamp right now. I chose to update the whole site, rather than do it piece by piece so please accept my apology.
If you comment to this thread, I'll circle back and let everyone know when the site is updated and you can tell us what you think about it.
So.... if you were to connect this free board to something, such that it provided GPS coords in each message (whats max msg length? It would seem that you can do ~6 messages per hour, every hour, for the month - for free?
Is this correct?
So I can make a GPS child tracker for my kids backpacks - and it would just cost the $50 -- EDIT, ah for 10 years.
This is wonderful.
We attempted to negotiate this in 2007 after leaving Lockheeds RFID division, and nobody would touch it :-( for our sensors.
Yep, your scenario works and it's completely possible and plausible.
Messages are extremely small and efficient OTA (highly optimized and compressed).
The API is JSON and messages are your own unconstrained JSON object, but they're transmitted as compressed binary. (You can also have a binary payload 'attachment' to a JSON message if you so choose.)
Although everything works fine if the messages are individually in the KB's, that's not the design center because of how we manage memory on our (STM32L4R5) MCU.
Things work most efficiently when the app uses lots of small messages. We buffer them in flash, and power-on the modem at user-settable intervals (or conditions) for upload.
The 500MB - is that per month - or once for the lifetime of the 10-year cell-"contract" of the card? (if once, how refill once depleted?)
THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS!.
(Also, while at Lockheed, our division was one of the early adopters of Groove. Sadly, we had factions who loved it and wanted to use it and factions who didnt want to change their workflows. -- As the head of IT, I liked it, although it had some quirks... it was too bad we didnt "find our groove" with Groove at the time. But the vision behind it was dope.)
I'm having a hard time finding out the physical dimensions of the cards. Can't see anything in the data sheet about that?
I'd like to know how small a configuration with a Notecard + carrier can be?
For sewing into a kids backpack I think it looks like it will be small enough, but in my mind, putting a tracker inside a shoe would be much better. A backpack is easily forgotten or lost somewhere, but shoes tend to stay with the person. However, to put it in a shoe it'd have to be pretty small.
Long time no chat! Haven’t talked to you since a couple years after Microsoft acquired Groove.
This is really cool, but I don’t see any information on costs if you go over the 500mb of cellular data. Probably missed it, but I did click around a lot trying.
A heads-up: I have been told flash wear can be a problem for such a use case if you always start writing records from the same address after transmitting the buffer. :)
Your raising of your own children is none of my business, but I'm curious: how do you think that being raised while constantly tracked affects the child later on in life?
My personal armchair worry is that it makes them likely to accept a dystopian surveillance society without even considering that it might be problematic.
Sounds like a market: backpack faraday cages and gps spoofing marketed to kids thru animated cartoons on the internet where they find a way to spend their parents money on it.
People are unreasonably scared of abductions. The most common use case would most likely be to find a kid that got lost.
Of course, this unreasonable fear of abductions means that a commercial GPS tracker for kids would sell much better if it supported the "abducted kid" use case well, on top of more likely use cases.
Backpacks are a mechanism for transporting your belongings in a convenient bag fashioned with straps such that you may wear it, carry your belongings AND have your hands free.
They would typically be worn by the child, and thus a good indicator of where your snowflake is.
Sure. It's a valid case. The problem is that it's probably also easily removable, unless you can hide the gps receiver, the cpu, and the long life battery in the bike itself and the necessary antennas (maybe under a sticker say).
Though I have to say I saw a youtube video recently (sorry to lazy to google it) where someone put an apple tracking device in a bike and was able to locate it after it was stolen.
The best place to put a tracker on a bike is in the fork's steering column, since it's empty and open at one end for antennas. Still, it would take a dedicated device, because it needs to fit in an 1" hole.
I've also thought about building a GPS child tracker, as I haven't found any reasonable/good existing options out there. Tell me if you need any assistance. I am a semi-incompetent full stack developer with IoT experience, reachable at hello at pushdata. io
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but Xplora[1] makes smart watches for children that can be used to call and also has a GPS tracker. They've become very popular here in Norway.
This doesn't look misleading to me. 5,000 events per month is very reasonable for a hobbyist project and the Prototype free tier is pretty generous as things go.
You could reduce the frequency by using an accelerometer to skip updates if there's no motion, and increase frequency if there is, thereby staying below the 5K limit.
See above. It's not required to use the Notecard, but it's extremely easy to use and convenient. The combination of the Notecard and the Notehub are essentially a simple JSON-centric "data pump", with a good deal of carrier data included.
We've priced it so we can make an "infrastructure-appropriate" profit on a sustainable basis; there's no 'surprise' business model and your data and your devices are yours, not ours.
I don't get how the front page could be so clearly misleading and not expect to get found out. It's all about nothing hidden and "that's all you pay" until you click pricing and then there are many different charges and models.
Nobody expects to be able to pull a 10,000gallon tanker truck up to a "free refills" soda station in a fast food joint and fill it.
Anybody who's in the target market for these also understands the "Includes IoT cellular connectivity for 10 years" isn't going to mean "Cool! I'll get one of these to stream 4K video to youtube 24x7x356x10, sweet!!!"
No, I'd expect it to mean free refills for me for the duration of my meal, like most people would.
My point is, there is quite an involved pricing model - 5 tiers, each tier has multiple charges in it, none of them obviously correspond to the advertising on the front page. They even repeatedly use the phrase "for X MB" which is unclear to me. I first read it as storage. I assume it means total upload/download? The numbers for this on other devices on the front page are not mentioned on the pricing page. Charging categories also have a mixture of sold-by-the-MB and sold-by-usage, as well as pre-sold - within a single tier.
The front page is selling "look, it's very clear and simple" and it's just obviously not clear and simple. Unclear why that view garners downvotes - this is honest feedback about their marketing and pricing. Even if they are mostly talking about the free tier, it's not clear
I’m not in the iot space and still understood that they probably have some tons of optimizations to reduce data on the devices and probably buy wholesale data to form one big pool.
There's a free tier limited to 5,000 events/month. The "Deploy" tier is $5,389.20 per project/year, plus event charges, plus a "connectivity assurance" charge.
Still, you could get a lot done with the free tier if you didn't overdo the traffic. Every half hour, "Soda machine #5621, no alarms, outside temp 82F, inside temp 36F, cash $75.25, stock level for Diet Pepsi 4, stock level for Sprite 50..."
[1] https://blues.io/services/