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Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity

ipspam 5y ago
I don't fully understand this kind of thing, but it gives me a small selfish hope..... That I can have a decade of remote car starting from anywhere for less than the current fee for 1 year.
- gffrd 5y ago
  There's a fee for remote car starting?? Is this an aftermarket thing or a factory thing?
  - chomp 5y ago
    Some vehicles have cellular built-in to where you can start your vehicle with your phone remotely. Some make it free, others charge for it.
- rozzie 5y ago
  You can easily develop this, and you won't pay anything except for the Notecard. It'll work until you reach 500MB or 10 years, whichever is sooner. (We offer the ability to upgrade beyond 500MB.)
Eifoov7h11 5y ago
> cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity sounds like a security nightmare
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Only if your attackers pay for access - just kidding, but in this approach the board isn't connected all the time I don't think, only when it sends a message.
  - bigiain 5y ago
    Or if your attackers can NSL blues.io/AWS/Azure...
- rozzie 5y ago
  Not so much. On-board STSAFE secure element with ST-issued ECC P-384 certificate provisioned at point of chip manufacture. Sessions are TLS-encrypted to the Notehub: TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 Kind of wonderfully, all traffic flows from the carrier over a VLAN to the AWS/Azure Notehub instances, so your devices aren't even visible to attackers on the internet. And if you don't want your data in the clear on the Notehub, there are options for you to place your server's public key in fleet environment variables, and the data will be end-to-end encrypted between device and your service.
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    These are super helpful responses. Makes me want to instabuy.
  - atonse 5y ago
    Sounds amazing. What is the insurance policy if you get acquired and the platform gets retired?
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Interestingly, setting aside whatever else you can say about Lotus Notes, Ray's work was some of the earliest to prioritize what we now recognize as good infosec practices in client/server computing. He's got plenty of street cred in this area, enough to earn the benefit of the doubt.
Animats 5y ago
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..." [1] https://blues.io/services/ https://blues.io/services/
- matt2000 5y ago
  Is that pricing for an additional service that is optional, or is it required to operate the card? I'm confused.
  - asah 5y ago
    same here - "Prototype" ($0/mon) looks like what most hobbyists would use who exceed 5K/mon: https://blues.io/services/ https://blues.io/services/
  - rozzie 5y ago
    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.
- rozzie 5y ago
  Yes, if you use our Notehub there is a free tier, and higher tiers are still very reasonable. (It does cost money to run infrastructure.) That said, although we don't talk much about it, the HN crowd may be interested in knowing that this exists: https://github.com/blues/note https://github.com/blues/note If you want to use the Notecard and you like Golang, you can spin up your own server and switch the notecard to speak with it via the "host" field in this JSON request: https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hub-set https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hu...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
baybal2 5y ago
Who is that Ozzie?
- yellowfish 5y ago
  lotus notes, and a fill in for creepybill at microsoft for a while
  - pitched 5y ago
    What’s “creepybill”? Obviously Bill Gates but a quick search isn’t showing what’s it a reference to?
    - yellowfish 5y ago
      many inappropriate relationships and sexual advances on employees while he was at microsoft edit: you downvote this but cry about horrible the treatment of women at companies like Blizzard, get real it's the same thing except creepybill has more money and clout
    - sgerenser 5y ago
      Presumably the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by Bill Gates: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-harassment-inappropriate-conduct-women-microsoft-jeffrey-epstein-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-harassment-inappr...
devmor 5y ago
I feel like with the sheer amount of IoT options available, using hardware that's vendor-locked to a cloud service is a risky move. Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?
- wmf 5y ago
  They claim to be 10x cheaper.
- rozzie 5y ago
  I believe the greatest unrealized potential is for product manufacturers to embed cloud connectivity without the end-user needing to do anything to get it working. The Kindle Whispernet model is my ideal, where you make an up-front decision to buy a cell-enabled product and it just works. The classic model of monthly charging, activation, deactivation, etc used by the likes of the Apple Watch are not good for IoT because then someone needs to - ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on. Of course, if you want to just use the Notecard with your own SIM, you can. The Notecard and all the standard Notecarriers have an external SIM slot (usually used when someone wants to use it in a non-covered country such as China).
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were selling with it, and trying to break into the market and willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired it. That means it was not working pricewise. To put it this way lets say the ODM makes a device for 40 bucks and sells it to you for 50. Their cost to their MDN/carrier is say 1 dollar per month per device. That means at best they can float you for is 10 months before you start costing them money. That does not involve any other services they may have to pay for to make that connection happen (support, VMs/machines, phone lines, datalines, buildings, etc). But if there is an extra ARPU on each unit that time to cost you money is much longer and in some cases never happen. They way they priced this it looks like they are trying to get people into the ecosystem and are willing to eat some cost on that. Hoping to get a few whale accounts to cover the 'free' bits. > ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on That is exactly what MDNs like this do. They do that carrier abstraction for you. They do however charge for it. Each of the big carriers also do this and have programs for it. They have a list of pre-certified devices and 'try before you buy' style programs.
Jolter 5y ago
Can someone edit the title? Ray Ozzie doesn’t ring any bells and the title of the page is “The Notecard makes cellular IoT developer-friendly. Finally.” So the current title is already editorializing.
- __sy__ 5y ago
  He was basically the CTO at Microsoft for a number of years and that's just a short-snapshot into his long, successful career :)
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  Ray Ozzie is well known for being the creator of Lotus Notes and being the CTO and CSA of Microsoft for half a decade (taking over for Bill Gates as CSA) and introduced Azure during his time, and now the director of the board at HPE.
yesimahuman 5y ago
I was given one of these by their dev rel folks and I'm really impressed by it. Easy to use, and the interactive tutorial they have that uses the Web Serial API is really great. I haven't quite put it to production use so can't speak to that, but they've really nailed the developer experience.
- rozzie 5y ago
  Honestly, our thanks to Google's WebSerial folks who helped us to deliver the experience. It's quite wonderful. http://dev.blues.io http://dev.blues.io
  - mrjain 5y ago
    That Google WebSerial team needs a round of applause...what a great overall experience.
__sy__ 5y ago
This is very interesting. I'll provide a hot take since Seam (YC S20, i.e. the company I work for) could be a target customer for this for our on-prem multi-protocol hub. There are a number of use-cases that need a cellular back-up connection. 1. The data cost of most cellular solutions out there does eliminate a number of interesting use-cases that just don't have the margins/unit-economics to swallow $10/mon of data cost. For Seam, we're currently looking at Twilio and Skywire. If this is in fact 10X cheaper, I'd want to dig into why. This may be an unpopular & contrarian opinion, but so far my take is that regular carrier networks are pretty good at what they do (network ops, real-estate placement...etc)[1]. Competing with them on pricing probably implies some important trade-offs. 2. The provisioning of a cellular modem is a bit of a PITA. AT commands can vary for each modem and makes the process a bit daunting. But if you're making a lot of units of your product like us, it's really not that big of a deal. 3. The PCI connector is interesting. I think the form factor is what makes it a non-option for Seam's Hub, mostly because it's not something we can easily plug into an existing custom PCBA. But starting with the hobbyist market, or low-scale production devices [2], is probably a good idea. They can later work their way toward modules the way most LTE modems are sort of sold today. [1] If i am wrong, please let me know. I am genuinely curious to know where areas of operation improvements could exist in the current U.S. carrier market. [2] This is the market that OTA as a service folks are targeting. It's much bigger than one would initially think. Example of companies in this space include Esper, Balena...etc
- rozzie 5y ago
  There are no tricks to the Notecard's pricing. The 500MB/10-years of data is embedded within the hardware pricing, which is $49 for North America and $59 for 135+ countries. What's more, it's "permanent roaming" and you don't need to identify the end-user of the device. It can be used anonymously.
  - __sy__ 5y ago
    Welp, first, thank you for taking the time to respond here. My mom won't believe it when I tell her that THE Ray Ozzie responded to my random HN comment :) Second, could you comment a bit on the latency/bandwidth of your solution? I was poking around the site and couldn't find that answer immediately available.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This looks cool, too bad Ray Ozzie is a huge piece of shit
- Karsteski 5y ago
  Why do you say this?
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    Because of how he behaved wrt to the Groove staff when he sold the company to Microsoft
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bityard 5y ago
Tangentially related: I set up a security camera based on Raspberry Pi in an area with no wifi. It sends notifications and pictures to my phone when any motion is detected. From T-Mobile, the hotspot was free and the data plan is $5 a month. The data plan only has a few hundred meg of "fast" data but unlimited 128k/sec after that. Which is perfectly fine since the images it sends are usually around 100k each. It's been working great for months. A rare trifecta of cheap, easy, and good. (Although it did take a weekend to build and test.)
- walterbell 5y ago
  Thanks for the pointer, could you share a link or search term for this plan?
  - myelin 5y ago
    I see the $5/month plan here: https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/affordable-data-plans https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/affordable-data-pl... Their hotspot page shows two which are free with a 5GB plan, but I can't find a deal which makes them free with the 512MB one though.
- matttrotter 5y ago
  Nice!! You could spend $49 on this, and after 500 MB (~5000 pictures?), just buy another one and replace it! Have any project pages? GitHub? website? etc?
  - leo_bloom 5y ago
    > and after 500 MB (~5000 pictures?), just buy another one and replace it! That sounds very wasteful, to throw hardware away because a subscription ended.
    - matttrotter 5y ago
      It was meant in jest. :)
- 5y ago
ourcat 5y ago
With this offer of $49 for "10 years of cellular" (and 500Mb data [1]) included, I wonder which LTE network is expected to provide and support that connectivity for that long? Something like this could be a good candidate for what the Helium Network (and similar) are intending to do. [1] : https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-5...
- bassman9000 5y ago
  500Mb across the 10years? Monthly?
  - rozzie 5y ago
    The Notecard auto-activates on first use. Without a recharge, it will "just work" until the earlier of a) 10 years b) 500MB of data used If you need more years or more data we can help, but in the vast, vast majority of narrowband use cases we've found this to be quite sufficient.
  - ourcat 5y ago
    That's what it comes loaded with. 500Mb data and 10 years connectivity, which I assume you can top-up.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Based on prior comments from the seller, for the life. And so nobody else has to compute it, that's: 5,256,000 minutes in 10 years (ignoring leap years) 500,000,000 bytes of data (assuming mega and not mebi) An average of 95 bytes a minute per device over that 10 years, or an average of 951 bytes every 10 minutes, or more than 5k an hour. For event messages, that seems like something that can be worked within fairly easily, depending on use.
    - rozzie 5y ago
      Truth in advertising: As stated in another response above, if you want to do a real computation you need to factor-in "session setup" overhead. If you config for TCP/IP (unencrypted) your session overhead is about 1kb. If you config for TLS, your session overhead is just under 4KB. Once the session starts, data transfer is super efficient - probably about 250-500 bytes for a half dozen or dozen notes of typical size. Session duration is typically 1-2 seconds. The other secret of most IoT platforms is that their negotiated rates round sessions to 1KB boundaries. That's insane for IoT. For ours there is no rounding, and the 'practical' rounding is the 40-byte TCP/IP header.
brk 5y ago
Is this certified on any carrier networks? Is it intended to be a component of a final solution, or is it more of a reference design? This looks/feels like an uncertified reference design, which is OK, but I'm trying to gauge applicability to build a product on top of this beyond a hobbyist scenario.
- rozzie 5y ago
  It's PTCRB-certified as an "End Product", so it doesn't require the customer's product to be further PTCRB-certified. It operates in 135+ countries. It's an embeddable component that is to be installed in product manufacturers' end products. It is not just a reference design. You can think of the "notecarriers", though, as OSS reference designs or accelerators. They're intended to make it quick to prototype and deploy pilots, before designing the m.2 connector into your own design.
  - tudorw 5y ago
    Nice :) The dollar pricing on the front page made me think this might be US only, thankfully not the case, this is a very exciting piece of the jigsaw :)
  - sim5132 5y ago
    The definition of an End Product by the PTCRB is that it must utilise one of these physical interfaces: "Physical Interface - If a physical control interface is required for the End Product, it shall utilize one of the following: USB, PCMCIA, Compact Flash, MMC, RS-232 (DE9), or IEEE-1394. No other physical control interfaces are acceptable." http://www.ptcrb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PTCRB-PPMD-3_0.pdf http://www.ptcrb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PTCRB-PPMD-3... Curious how an M.2 based connector was allowed here as they are explicitly called out as connectors allowed for PTRCB modules, not end devices.
lallysingh 5y ago
Is that 500MB total transferred over the 10 years? Or per month?
- rob_lauer 5y ago
  500MB over 10 years, but you can "top up" if need-be. A primary use case would be for sensor data which can stretch 500MB a long time, not high-bandwidth streaming video.
smoldesu 5y ago
I might have been interested if "flat rate" didn't really mean "Tracphone subscription model". I'm sick and tired of SaaS companies nickle-and-diming me, I'm certainly not going to add a second cellular plan to my stack anytime soon.
Reventlov 5y ago
So what network is it using ? What frequency ? What range ? What is the maximum size for messages ? Where is the coverage map ? Is it LoRa ? Sigfox ? It says cellular, so, LTE ? Something else ? Anyone has data on this ?
- ourcat 5y ago
  https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-5...
  - rozzie 5y ago
    Just so there's no confusion, you linked to the "NOTE-WBEX" which is europe-only. If you're interested in countries covered, it's best to look at "NOTE-NBGL": https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-nbgl-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-nbgl-5...
    - ourcat 5y ago
      Got it. :+1: UK here.
ds 5y ago
In a modified configuration, this will completely eat the gps tracker market. The pricing is insane. Normally if you want to track something like a car, you have to get a little tracking device (Which to be fair can be had from alibaba for ~$15) and put a sim in it at a minimum of $10/month. Getting a ping every 10 minutes with location is more than ample for most things. I suppose you could also give it a request to turn on minute-based updates as well if need be.
- rozzie 5y ago
  You may be interested to know that the Notecard + Notecarrier-AA, without any host MCU, and with just a couple lines of JSON to configure it, act as a tracker. It has on-board GNSS plus antenna, plus an accelerometer so that it doesn't consume energy when not in motion. (It draws about 8uA when idle.) Also, if you want to pair it with a $2 ESP32 configured with ESP-AT firmware, the built-in firmware will also do WiFi triangulation. Yes, we have customers using it as a simple tracker. However, to be clear, this is not a complete "to the glass" tracking solution. All it does is to send tracking data to your service via HTTP JSON. If you have a system that "just wants the data", this is a perfect solution.
  - ds 5y ago
    I know you guys likely want to focus on being the shovel vs the gold miner, but if you were to setup a ready-to-go tracking package, You would easily take over the entire market. The amount that insurance companies pay for services to track leased-cars, Shipping carriers wanting to track high value items, etc.. Its a massive market- and all of them are paying 3-5$/month per tracker. You should consider making a white labeled tracker 'company' you own in house. You could charge easily, 4-5x more than you do for the product. Its also the most obvious use case for your product. You would kill it.
    - topspin 5y ago
      I agree with your prediction about the market value of low cost trackers. I've been searching for a low cost way to track things for a long time.
SubuSS 5y ago
Sorry dumb question: what are the dimensions of the board? I am not able to find this anywhere on the site.
- trollied 5y ago
  Here: https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/tree/master/Notecard https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/tree/master/Notecard The PDFs have dimensions
- rozzie 5y ago
  30mm x 35mm, plugging into a standard M.2 Key E socket
rektide 5y ago
Related question, do any mobile (virtual/non-virtual) carriers other than Google allow for additional sim cards to be added to an account without monthly fee? Rather than IoT devices each coming with their own cellular service, it'd be lovely if users could attach cellular devices to their own plans. Alas, the pricing model for most carriers makes this sadly unrealistic.
pryelluw 5y ago
Suggestion for docs: - Please include a clear link to the dev boards from the main menu. - The back button seems to be hijacked. I went from blues.io to dev.blues.io and couldn’t navigate back with the back button. Mobile safari.
floatboth 5y ago
I kinda hate the "we give you a microcontroller that you can't program, only talk to it using some protocol" model. It just feels wrong, having to add an external one just for the application code. And here the protocol is even tied to a particular web API on the other side (looks like you can change the URL to your own instance but it's still all tightly coupled to the shape of the API).
- atonse 5y ago
  Depends on the market. If I wanted to tinker I wouldn’t buy this. If I wanted to build a white labeled product quickly without having to even think about sourcing hardware and worrying about updating their firmware etc, this would be extremely attractive as it brings the time to market way down. There are other platforms like this.
- abraae 5y ago
  I can understand why it's locked down. But I wish (selfishly) they had added some very basic inbuilt IO. Myself I would want 1or 2 gpio pound and in particular a couple of ADCs to measure 4-20mA sensors.
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
"For early adopters and evaluation" - does that mean this is a limited time deal for now?
- avisser 5y ago
  I think it means you can order 1 or 2, but you can't order 10,000.
adolph 5y ago
Some interesting projects using this are documented here: https://www.hackster.io/blues-wireless https://www.hackster.io/blues-wireless
Causality1 5y ago
I'm somewhat sceptical the cellular hardware in question will be functional for ten years. The 3G sunset is killing quite recent devices. Will 4G be around for another decade?
- rozzie 5y ago
  LTE feels as though it is going to be an exception to that rule. This is the dawn of eMTC lifecycle
frhack 5y ago
Why syncronous protocol ?
macmac 5y ago
Curious why the EMEA card would be USD 20 more expensive?
expliced 5y ago
Does this board allow for cloud-to-device communication as well? I can only find this line on the product page which idicates that the answer is no: "The Notecard is a device-to-cloud data pump"
matt3D 5y ago
Looking at the list of options available it seems like the Global version is cheaper than the EMEA one. Does this mean the global antenna functions suboptimally in the EMEA region? Another question, could this work well with something like Firebase? the event retention restrictions on Notehub would put a spanner in the works for my use case.
roland35 5y ago
Is there another interface besides json? Json works great with languages like python but can get painful for embedded c on microcontrollers.
BuffaloBagel 5y ago
@rozzie I deploy in the rural intermountain west where Verizon reigns supreme for connectivity. Are you on their network?
matt_the_bass 5y ago
Looks cool! How does this differ from http://particle.io http://particle.io ?
- gnabgib 5y ago
  Is there a specific part of this website.. a specific product+service combo you feel competes?
  - matt_the_bass 5y ago
    Particle seems to offer more options and products other than just cellular. But if just looking at the cellular options, my understanding is that both offer an inexpensive, one time fee dev board/module solution for IoT with data.

I don't fully understand this kind of thing, but it gives me a small selfish hope..... That I can have a decade of remote car starting from anywhere for less than the current fee for 1 year.

gffrd 5y ago
There's a fee for remote car starting?? Is this an aftermarket thing or a factory thing?
- chomp 5y ago
  Some vehicles have cellular built-in to where you can start your vehicle with your phone remotely. Some make it free, others charge for it.
rozzie 5y ago
You can easily develop this, and you won't pay anything except for the Notecard. It'll work until you reach 500MB or 10 years, whichever is sooner. (We offer the ability to upgrade beyond 500MB.)

Eifoov7h11 5y ago

> cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity sounds like a security nightmare

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Only if your attackers pay for access - just kidding, but in this approach the board isn't connected all the time I don't think, only when it sends a message.
- bigiain 5y ago
  Or if your attackers can NSL blues.io/AWS/Azure...
rozzie 5y ago
Not so much. On-board STSAFE secure element with ST-issued ECC P-384 certificate provisioned at point of chip manufacture. Sessions are TLS-encrypted to the Notehub: TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 Kind of wonderfully, all traffic flows from the carrier over a VLAN to the AWS/Azure Notehub instances, so your devices aren't even visible to attackers on the internet. And if you don't want your data in the clear on the Notehub, there are options for you to place your server's public key in fleet environment variables, and the data will be end-to-end encrypted between device and your service.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  These are super helpful responses. Makes me want to instabuy.
- atonse 5y ago
  Sounds amazing. What is the insurance policy if you get acquired and the platform gets retired?
CamperBob2 5y ago
Interestingly, setting aside whatever else you can say about Lotus Notes, Ray's work was some of the earliest to prioritize what we now recognize as good infosec practices in client/server computing. He's got plenty of street cred in this area, enough to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Animats 5y ago

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..." [1] https://blues.io/services/ https://blues.io/services/

matt2000 5y ago
Is that pricing for an additional service that is optional, or is it required to operate the card? I'm confused.
- asah 5y ago
  same here - "Prototype" ($0/mon) looks like what most hobbyists would use who exceed 5K/mon: https://blues.io/services/ https://blues.io/services/
- rozzie 5y ago
  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.
rozzie 5y ago
Yes, if you use our Notehub there is a free tier, and higher tiers are still very reasonable. (It does cost money to run infrastructure.) That said, although we don't talk much about it, the HN crowd may be interested in knowing that this exists: https://github.com/blues/note https://github.com/blues/note If you want to use the Notecard and you like Golang, you can spin up your own server and switch the notecard to speak with it via the "host" field in this JSON request: https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hub-set https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hu...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

baybal2 5y ago

Who is that Ozzie?

yellowfish 5y ago
lotus notes, and a fill in for creepybill at microsoft for a while
- pitched 5y ago
  What’s “creepybill”? Obviously Bill Gates but a quick search isn’t showing what’s it a reference to?
  - yellowfish 5y ago
    many inappropriate relationships and sexual advances on employees while he was at microsoft edit: you downvote this but cry about horrible the treatment of women at companies like Blizzard, get real it's the same thing except creepybill has more money and clout
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    Presumably the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by Bill Gates: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-harassment-inappropriate-conduct-women-microsoft-jeffrey-epstein-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-harassment-inappr...

devmor 5y ago

I feel like with the sheer amount of IoT options available, using hardware that's vendor-locked to a cloud service is a risky move. Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?

wmf 5y ago
They claim to be 10x cheaper.
rozzie 5y ago
I believe the greatest unrealized potential is for product manufacturers to embed cloud connectivity without the end-user needing to do anything to get it working. The Kindle Whispernet model is my ideal, where you make an up-front decision to buy a cell-enabled product and it just works. The classic model of monthly charging, activation, deactivation, etc used by the likes of the Apple Watch are not good for IoT because then someone needs to - ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on. Of course, if you want to just use the Notecard with your own SIM, you can. The Notecard and all the standard Notecarriers have an external SIM slot (usually used when someone wants to use it in a non-covered country such as China).
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were selling with it, and trying to break into the market and willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired it. That means it was not working pricewise. To put it this way lets say the ODM makes a device for 40 bucks and sells it to you for 50. Their cost to their MDN/carrier is say 1 dollar per month per device. That means at best they can float you for is 10 months before you start costing them money. That does not involve any other services they may have to pay for to make that connection happen (support, VMs/machines, phone lines, datalines, buildings, etc). But if there is an extra ARPU on each unit that time to cost you money is much longer and in some cases never happen. They way they priced this it looks like they are trying to get people into the ecosystem and are willing to eat some cost on that. Hoping to get a few whale accounts to cover the 'free' bits. > ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on That is exactly what MDNs like this do. They do that carrier abstraction for you. They do however charge for it. Each of the big carriers also do this and have programs for it. They have a list of pre-certified devices and 'try before you buy' style programs.

Jolter 5y ago

Can someone edit the title? Ray Ozzie doesn’t ring any bells and the title of the page is “The Notecard makes cellular IoT developer-friendly. Finally.” So the current title is already editorializing.

__sy__ 5y ago
He was basically the CTO at Microsoft for a number of years and that's just a short-snapshot into his long, successful career :)
DiabloD3 5y ago
Ray Ozzie is well known for being the creator of Lotus Notes and being the CTO and CSA of Microsoft for half a decade (taking over for Bill Gates as CSA) and introduced Azure during his time, and now the director of the board at HPE.

yesimahuman 5y ago

I was given one of these by their dev rel folks and I'm really impressed by it. Easy to use, and the interactive tutorial they have that uses the Web Serial API is really great. I haven't quite put it to production use so can't speak to that, but they've really nailed the developer experience.

rozzie 5y ago
Honestly, our thanks to Google's WebSerial folks who helped us to deliver the experience. It's quite wonderful. http://dev.blues.io http://dev.blues.io
- mrjain 5y ago
  That Google WebSerial team needs a round of applause...what a great overall experience.

__sy__ 5y ago

This is very interesting. I'll provide a hot take since Seam (YC S20, i.e. the company I work for) could be a target customer for this for our on-prem multi-protocol hub. There are a number of use-cases that need a cellular back-up connection. 1. The data cost of most cellular solutions out there does eliminate a number of interesting use-cases that just don't have the margins/unit-economics to swallow $10/mon of data cost. For Seam, we're currently looking at Twilio and Skywire. If this is in fact 10X cheaper, I'd want to dig into why. This may be an unpopular & contrarian opinion, but so far my take is that regular carrier networks are pretty good at what they do (network ops, real-estate placement...etc)[1]. Competing with them on pricing probably implies some important trade-offs. 2. The provisioning of a cellular modem is a bit of a PITA. AT commands can vary for each modem and makes the process a bit daunting. But if you're making a lot of units of your product like us, it's really not that big of a deal. 3. The PCI connector is interesting. I think the form factor is what makes it a non-option for Seam's Hub, mostly because it's not something we can easily plug into an existing custom PCBA. But starting with the hobbyist market, or low-scale production devices [2], is probably a good idea. They can later work their way toward modules the way most LTE modems are sort of sold today. [1] If i am wrong, please let me know. I am genuinely curious to know where areas of operation improvements could exist in the current U.S. carrier market. [2] This is the market that OTA as a service folks are targeting. It's much bigger than one would initially think. Example of companies in this space include Esper, Balena...etc

rozzie 5y ago
There are no tricks to the Notecard's pricing. The 500MB/10-years of data is embedded within the hardware pricing, which is $49 for North America and $59 for 135+ countries. What's more, it's "permanent roaming" and you don't need to identify the end-user of the device. It can be used anonymously.
- __sy__ 5y ago
  Welp, first, thank you for taking the time to respond here. My mom won't believe it when I tell her that THE Ray Ozzie responded to my random HN comment :) Second, could you comment a bit on the latency/bandwidth of your solution? I was poking around the site and couldn't find that answer immediately available.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This looks cool, too bad Ray Ozzie is a huge piece of shit

Karsteski 5y ago
Why do you say this?
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Because of how he behaved wrt to the Groove staff when he sold the company to Microsoft
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bityard 5y ago

Tangentially related: I set up a security camera based on Raspberry Pi in an area with no wifi. It sends notifications and pictures to my phone when any motion is detected. From T-Mobile, the hotspot was free and the data plan is $5 a month. The data plan only has a few hundred meg of "fast" data but unlimited 128k/sec after that. Which is perfectly fine since the images it sends are usually around 100k each. It's been working great for months. A rare trifecta of cheap, easy, and good. (Although it did take a weekend to build and test.)

walterbell 5y ago
Thanks for the pointer, could you share a link or search term for this plan?
- myelin 5y ago
  I see the $5/month plan here: https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/affordable-data-plans https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/affordable-data-pl... Their hotspot page shows two which are free with a 5GB plan, but I can't find a deal which makes them free with the 512MB one though.
matttrotter 5y ago
Nice!! You could spend $49 on this, and after 500 MB (~5000 pictures?), just buy another one and replace it! Have any project pages? GitHub? website? etc?
- leo_bloom 5y ago
  > and after 500 MB (~5000 pictures?), just buy another one and replace it! That sounds very wasteful, to throw hardware away because a subscription ended.
  - matttrotter 5y ago
    It was meant in jest. :)
5y ago

ourcat 5y ago

With this offer of $49 for "10 years of cellular" (and 500Mb data [1]) included, I wonder which LTE network is expected to provide and support that connectivity for that long? Something like this could be a good candidate for what the Helium Network (and similar) are intending to do. [1] : https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-5...

bassman9000 5y ago
500Mb across the 10years? Monthly?
- rozzie 5y ago
  The Notecard auto-activates on first use. Without a recharge, it will "just work" until the earlier of a) 10 years b) 500MB of data used If you need more years or more data we can help, but in the vast, vast majority of narrowband use cases we've found this to be quite sufficient.
- ourcat 5y ago
  That's what it comes loaded with. 500Mb data and 10 years connectivity, which I assume you can top-up.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Based on prior comments from the seller, for the life. And so nobody else has to compute it, that's: 5,256,000 minutes in 10 years (ignoring leap years) 500,000,000 bytes of data (assuming mega and not mebi) An average of 95 bytes a minute per device over that 10 years, or an average of 951 bytes every 10 minutes, or more than 5k an hour. For event messages, that seems like something that can be worked within fairly easily, depending on use.
  - rozzie 5y ago
    Truth in advertising: As stated in another response above, if you want to do a real computation you need to factor-in "session setup" overhead. If you config for TCP/IP (unencrypted) your session overhead is about 1kb. If you config for TLS, your session overhead is just under 4KB. Once the session starts, data transfer is super efficient - probably about 250-500 bytes for a half dozen or dozen notes of typical size. Session duration is typically 1-2 seconds. The other secret of most IoT platforms is that their negotiated rates round sessions to 1KB boundaries. That's insane for IoT. For ours there is no rounding, and the 'practical' rounding is the 40-byte TCP/IP header.

brk 5y ago

Is this certified on any carrier networks? Is it intended to be a component of a final solution, or is it more of a reference design? This looks/feels like an uncertified reference design, which is OK, but I'm trying to gauge applicability to build a product on top of this beyond a hobbyist scenario.

rozzie 5y ago
It's PTCRB-certified as an "End Product", so it doesn't require the customer's product to be further PTCRB-certified. It operates in 135+ countries. It's an embeddable component that is to be installed in product manufacturers' end products. It is not just a reference design. You can think of the "notecarriers", though, as OSS reference designs or accelerators. They're intended to make it quick to prototype and deploy pilots, before designing the m.2 connector into your own design.
- tudorw 5y ago
  Nice :) The dollar pricing on the front page made me think this might be US only, thankfully not the case, this is a very exciting piece of the jigsaw :)
- sim5132 5y ago
  The definition of an End Product by the PTCRB is that it must utilise one of these physical interfaces: "Physical Interface - If a physical control interface is required for the End Product, it shall utilize one of the following: USB, PCMCIA, Compact Flash, MMC, RS-232 (DE9), or IEEE-1394. No other physical control interfaces are acceptable." http://www.ptcrb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PTCRB-PPMD-3_0.pdf http://www.ptcrb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PTCRB-PPMD-3... Curious how an M.2 based connector was allowed here as they are explicitly called out as connectors allowed for PTRCB modules, not end devices.

lallysingh 5y ago

Is that 500MB total transferred over the 10 years? Or per month?

rob_lauer 5y ago
500MB over 10 years, but you can "top up" if need-be. A primary use case would be for sensor data which can stretch 500MB a long time, not high-bandwidth streaming video.

smoldesu 5y ago

I might have been interested if "flat rate" didn't really mean "Tracphone subscription model". I'm sick and tired of SaaS companies nickle-and-diming me, I'm certainly not going to add a second cellular plan to my stack anytime soon.

Reventlov 5y ago

So what network is it using ? What frequency ? What range ? What is the maximum size for messages ? Where is the coverage map ? Is it LoRa ? Sigfox ? It says cellular, so, LTE ? Something else ? Anyone has data on this ?

ourcat 5y ago
https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-wbex-5...
- rozzie 5y ago
  Just so there's no confusion, you linked to the "NOTE-WBEX" which is europe-only. If you're interested in countries covered, it's best to look at "NOTE-NBGL": https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-nbgl-500/#cellular-service https://dev.blues.io/hardware/notecard-datasheet/note-nbgl-5...
  - ourcat 5y ago
    Got it. :+1: UK here.

ds 5y ago

In a modified configuration, this will completely eat the gps tracker market. The pricing is insane. Normally if you want to track something like a car, you have to get a little tracking device (Which to be fair can be had from alibaba for ~$15) and put a sim in it at a minimum of $10/month. Getting a ping every 10 minutes with location is more than ample for most things. I suppose you could also give it a request to turn on minute-based updates as well if need be.

rozzie 5y ago
You may be interested to know that the Notecard + Notecarrier-AA, without any host MCU, and with just a couple lines of JSON to configure it, act as a tracker. It has on-board GNSS plus antenna, plus an accelerometer so that it doesn't consume energy when not in motion. (It draws about 8uA when idle.) Also, if you want to pair it with a $2 ESP32 configured with ESP-AT firmware, the built-in firmware will also do WiFi triangulation. Yes, we have customers using it as a simple tracker. However, to be clear, this is not a complete "to the glass" tracking solution. All it does is to send tracking data to your service via HTTP JSON. If you have a system that "just wants the data", this is a perfect solution.
- ds 5y ago
  I know you guys likely want to focus on being the shovel vs the gold miner, but if you were to setup a ready-to-go tracking package, You would easily take over the entire market. The amount that insurance companies pay for services to track leased-cars, Shipping carriers wanting to track high value items, etc.. Its a massive market- and all of them are paying 3-5$/month per tracker. You should consider making a white labeled tracker 'company' you own in house. You could charge easily, 4-5x more than you do for the product. Its also the most obvious use case for your product. You would kill it.
  - topspin 5y ago
    I agree with your prediction about the market value of low cost trackers. I've been searching for a low cost way to track things for a long time.

SubuSS 5y ago

Sorry dumb question: what are the dimensions of the board? I am not able to find this anywhere on the site.

trollied 5y ago
Here: https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/tree/master/Notecard https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/tree/master/Notecard The PDFs have dimensions
rozzie 5y ago
30mm x 35mm, plugging into a standard M.2 Key E socket

rektide 5y ago

Related question, do any mobile (virtual/non-virtual) carriers other than Google allow for additional sim cards to be added to an account without monthly fee? Rather than IoT devices each coming with their own cellular service, it'd be lovely if users could attach cellular devices to their own plans. Alas, the pricing model for most carriers makes this sadly unrealistic.

pryelluw 5y ago

Suggestion for docs: - Please include a clear link to the dev boards from the main menu. - The back button seems to be hijacked. I went from blues.io to dev.blues.io and couldn’t navigate back with the back button. Mobile safari.

floatboth 5y ago

I kinda hate the "we give you a microcontroller that you can't program, only talk to it using some protocol" model. It just feels wrong, having to add an external one just for the application code. And here the protocol is even tied to a particular web API on the other side (looks like you can change the URL to your own instance but it's still all tightly coupled to the shape of the API).

atonse 5y ago
Depends on the market. If I wanted to tinker I wouldn’t buy this. If I wanted to build a white labeled product quickly without having to even think about sourcing hardware and worrying about updating their firmware etc, this would be extremely attractive as it brings the time to market way down. There are other platforms like this.
abraae 5y ago
I can understand why it's locked down. But I wish (selfishly) they had added some very basic inbuilt IO. Myself I would want 1or 2 gpio pound and in particular a couple of ADCs to measure 4-20mA sensors.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

"For early adopters and evaluation" - does that mean this is a limited time deal for now?

avisser 5y ago
I think it means you can order 1 or 2, but you can't order 10,000.

adolph 5y ago

Some interesting projects using this are documented here: https://www.hackster.io/blues-wireless https://www.hackster.io/blues-wireless

Causality1 5y ago

I'm somewhat sceptical the cellular hardware in question will be functional for ten years. The 3G sunset is killing quite recent devices. Will 4G be around for another decade?

rozzie 5y ago
LTE feels as though it is going to be an exception to that rule. This is the dawn of eMTC lifecycle

frhack 5y ago

Why syncronous protocol ?

macmac 5y ago

Curious why the EMEA card would be USD 20 more expensive?

expliced 5y ago

Does this board allow for cloud-to-device communication as well? I can only find this line on the product page which idicates that the answer is no: "The Notecard is a device-to-cloud data pump"

matt3D 5y ago

Looking at the list of options available it seems like the Global version is cheaper than the EMEA one. Does this mean the global antenna functions suboptimally in the EMEA region? Another question, could this work well with something like Firebase? the event retention restrictions on Notehub would put a spanner in the works for my use case.

roland35 5y ago

Is there another interface besides json? Json works great with languages like python but can get painful for embedded c on microcontrollers.

BuffaloBagel 5y ago

@rozzie I deploy in the rural intermountain west where Verizon reigns supreme for connectivity. Are you on their network?

matt_the_bass 5y ago

Looks cool! How does this differ from http://particle.io http://particle.io ?

gnabgib 5y ago
Is there a specific part of this website.. a specific product+service combo you feel competes?
- matt_the_bass 5y ago
  Particle seems to offer more options and products other than just cellular. But if just looking at the cellular options, my understanding is that both offer an inexpensive, one time fee dev board/module solution for IoT with data.