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

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.

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.

Why is it desirable to track the kids backpacks? Are they so very untidy that they often get lost?

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.

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

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.

I like the free tier, it satisfies lots of gadgets' requirements:

Door lock.

Window shade.

Light switch.

Washing machine.

BBQ.

Pet feeder.

Sprinklers.

...or as we saw a few days ago: desk raiser/lowerer.

Happy to comment. We've been working on this for several years now and we're super proud of what we see people building and deploying.

The question is a bit general, so let me just give you some related facts.

- Because more than half our customers use this in a battery-powered way (such as a tracker), the normal operating mode (json-configured) is "normally quiescent" (~8uA draw) with the modem powered off completely. You program the sync period and can also kick off syncs manually, for example if you sense an urgent condition.

- In this "periodic mode", syncs are usually take about 15 seconds to register, 1 or 2 seconds to sync, and then hanguup. If you configure for TLS it sends about 4KB for the TLS session setup, and if you don't care about on-wire encryption you can use straight TCP at about 1KB. A half dozen reasonably-sized JSON notes compresses to about 250-500 bytes on the wire.

- Many customers don't use it battery-powered - such as embedding it inside an air handler or generator, etc. When in this mode, you can configure (JSON) it to be connected in a "continuous" mode. Not much downside - just a 1 packet (40 byte TCP header + 1 byte) for a ping every 20m for robustness.

When in continuous mode you get "instant sync" upstream, and get a bonus feature: If you use an HTTPS (JSON) API to send an inbound message to the device, it syncs instantly to the device.

- Our packets are so tiny that nobody ever thinks about actual modem bandwidth. However, you'll notice it when you're using it for firmware update. (We support DFU of modem, of our firmware, and of your own host MCU's firmware.)

We have 2 primary SKUs for the product: our "Narrowband" SKUs based on BG95 which support three RATS: LTE Cat-M1 (~375Kbps), LTE Cat-NB1 (~64Kbps), and GSM (~100Kbps).

For $10 more you can buy our "Wideband" SKUs based on EG91 which supports LTE Cat-1 4G/LTE, 3G, and GSM. These go up to 10Mbps.

Hope you find this interesting.

Looks like you communicate through that header over I2C, USB, or “serial”… which I am not sure if they mean SPI or UART/USART (or yes).

I'm hoping there will be an active Youtube community for "How to disable your TV's 5g" for whatever model of TV you have.

Or maybe just covering the entire back of the TV with foil tape would do the trick in most cases.

I was using Whispernet as an example of a great user experience; that's all.

There are no tricks and our prepaid/embedded pricing is real, and we will never sell anything for a loss. We're selling commercial IoT and our business must be sustainable. (Free tier of Notehub is an acquisition cost and that cost is extremely low.)

> 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.

3G Whispernet couldn't outlast the carriers getting rid of the hardware to support those frequencies. So yes, that means "forever" didn't work price-wise, in that Amazon didn't feel it was worthwhile to build their own outdated-tech cell network just to continue it, but it was still a reasonable "for most of the life of the device" offer - note that newer devices have 4g and still will work.