G’day guys! Chris here again from Core Electronics! Today I've got the SiPy from PyCon, now this is an interesting device it's one of the micro controllers out of a set of five available now that includes a Sig Fox radio. Now it's interesting why you would want to choose Sig Fox so we're going to need to talk about Sig Fox quite a bit so have a look below for the link to the documentation otherwise I'll go straight into it!

So there's an interesting problem with the SiPy from PyCon, in that you can get a LoPy4 for the same price that also has a Sig Fox radio, so the SiPy might not be around for very long but SiPy4 does the same thing. Sig Fox radio is also available in the FiPy as well so it's not like the feature is not covered in the range but the SiPy gives us a good excuse to talk about Sig Fox. If you're going to create an Internet of Things device you would first of all need to think about what device you're going to buy and I have a SiPy here that I'm going to show you at the end, you also need to know how you're going to get from the thing to the Internet. Now looking at the PyCon microcontrollers you've got Bluetooth available but Bluetooth is only short-range, low-power so if you had an Internet connected device that could share its connection over Bluetooth you could use that but that's physically very restricted. If you use the Wi-Fi that's built in you can even use an external Wi-Fi antenna and you'll get very good Wi-Fi range so again you still need to be able to access a Wi-Fi network and in general if you were looking at something that was deployed around in the suburbs in a rural area you don't have access to the Wi-Fi networks that are there, they're generally private owned.

So the next step up would probably be you need to use cellular data, an LTE 3G connection unfortunately we don't have to 2G available in Australia at all anymore so then you're stepping up into a fair bit of cost, you've got a monthly subscription that's fairly heavy duty. So Sig Fox aims to give your Internet of Things device just the connectivity it needs for the minimum cost and think about it in terms of a cellular radio, so there are Sig Fox operators that provide towers, base stations for Sig Fox all over the world and it's one system globally. So, whereas you might provide cellular data to your Australian deployment you can't use that in the US because they use a different set of frequencies for their LTE. So, Sig Fox is a single global system and you might be thinking “that sounds a lot like Laura”, well yes the two of them share the same radio band, the industrial scientific medical radio band ISM is just below one gigahertz range, eight hundred and something to nine hundred and something megahertz and it's different in areas around the world so when you create your Sig Fox code you have to tell it what zone it's operating in so that it chooses the right frequency.

So, Sig Fox does far more than just provide you the radio that's on your micro controller. Sig Fox is also the protocol that is spoken between the radio and the tower, it also provides the tower equipment, the tower radios, the software on the towers and the backend system. So, the normal deployment of a Sig Fox project is that you buy a Sig Fox device and put your coat on it and then at the backend you have an Internet cloud service, that talks to the Sig Fox backend so a message sent from your device basically goes into the Sig Fox Network and comes out the other side as a single message, a reliable message, a secure message and your backend system can deal with that and send a message back in. So Sig Fox is a demand/receive system so generally you would expect the radio to wake up on the device and send out what it needs to send and if it needs a message back it will make that as part of the request and wait for the message to come back.

So, I say that there are Sig Fox operators already available, there's already coverage around the world. Let's have a look at that, we'll go to the PC and we can see here on the webpage that I've created here the SiPy overview, there's a link here at the top (the logo is a link to the Sig Fox website) and there are some great videos there to help you learn about what Sig Fox is. If I go into the developers link that will take me to a very good learning platform where I can see videos one after the other and understand how Sig Fox works. Just going to jump back again for a moment I thought I’d just cover off these points here it's designed to be secure, low-power, long range, low cost, now there's some more points in there but if you put all those things together you realize that there is going to be a very significant limitation on what the service can do.

So we'll jump over to the global coverage map as linked here in the documentation and as I'm in Australia, the first thing I'm going to have to do is zoom out from France because Sig Fox was invented in France. So, we’re going to navigate away from France, head over towards Australia and on the east coast here north of Sydney is Newcastle. So I can look there at the office at which I work where my house is and I can see that there is Sig Fox coverage everywhere so I'm going to go ahead and create some Sig Fox projects that I expect will not only work for me at work and work at home but they should work on the drive in between. So there you go, you can go anywhere that you are in the world, you can have a look now at the Sig Fox coverage & Sig Fox is brought to you by a local operator so if you run down the page there you can see South Africa, Germany, Argentina, Australia has Thinxtra, some countries have multiple operators but look there at the available providers so that you can see what Sig Fox services are available to you so you basically need to do three things to get your Sig Fox project off the ground.

First you need to buy a seat Fox device and put code on it, second you need a subscription to get onto the Sig Fox network and then you need something at the backend that talks to the device. Now very nicely the PyCon devices that have Sig Fox radios come with two years of subscription prepaid. So, you get two years to play around and invent, you could even buy a fleet of these and operate them for two years at no cost. I haven't found what these subscription costs are yet, but I will do that so shortly. So, if we come home look at the bench here, I'll show you the hardware.

So here we have a WiPy at the top which I've used in my videos today and below is the SiPy. The main difference here is that you can see the WiPy is encapsulated, well not really encapsulated but there’s metal shielded radios under here for a processor under there and also is the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth and this bar here is the internal antenna. The same exists on the SiPy, it has the same package underneath the sticker there's actually two packages here under this long sticker so the right-hand end of the board is the same as a WiPy the extreme left hand end of the board is almost the same. On the SiPy you've got the same LED, the same button except you have another UFL connector up here. So the right-hand end we have a connector for a Wi-Fi / Bluetooth antenna and at the left-hand end is the Sig Fox antenna and the reason I've left the antenna connected is that it's very important that this device is not booted up without an antenna whereas Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can use the built-in antenna unless you select the external by default Sig Fox will use only the external antenna because it has no internal one. As you can see, they have the same two rows of fourteen pin connectors so either of these go straight onto the expansion board and onto the Py track and the Py sense.

So, I hope that's given you something of an introduction to Sig Fox and the SiPy from PyCon, it's very interesting. I'm going to be creating some projects so that I can try up the FiPy and the GPy and all the other Py devices together so that I can communicate with them on Sig Fox. Once again, the documentation is down below. Thank you so much for watching, see you later!