You'll be pleased to hear that Chris has recovered from COVID and is back at work today. It feels a bit mean to throw him straight into the weeknotes given he's not been here, so it's Adrian again today.

Nothing too exciting to report over the past fortnight.

I spent some time evaluating new NB-IoT and LTE-M modems. Got things running nicely over NB-IoT, which makes a change from some modules I've used in the past (looking at you, Pycom boards...). Naturally I haven't tried the LTE-M side of things yet, as that needs a day trip over to the East—in the UK there's a broadly East/West split, with NB-IoT coverage in the West (where Vodafone control the cell towers) and LTE-M in the East (where O2 have the cell towers). We've heard rumours of LTE-M coverage spreading West, but it's not here yet.

Swtiching projects, and low-power wireless network technologies, for another client I spun up a new chain of data handling. There are boards (developed by others on the team) sending data over LoRaWAN to the Things Network. The end customer's system is all in Amazon's cloud, so I connected up the AWS IoT service.

Because we can only send small amounts of data over LoRaWAN, the messages are packed into a compact binary format. I added a new lambda function over on the AWS side to unpack things and reformat it into the more server-friendly JSON to ease ingestion into the rest of their system.

Aside from that, there's been a bit of admin in preparation for the new starter next month. I guess weeknotes like these are giving them a low bar to clear for excitement and interest to ease them into the work... 😆