Raspberry pi Zero and USB 3G internet and XMPP = awesome IoT device

http://albert-david.blogspot.com/2016/09/rbox-raspberry-pi-zero-usb-3g-internet.html

by albert007_d • 10 years ago

20 4 10 years ago

albert-david.blogspot.com

hak8or• 10 years ago

Does anyone have any suggestions for cheap 3g and up modules? For 2g I can get a module off aliexpress that has 2g, GPS, and Bluetooth with a uart based interface for less than 15 bucks not including the antennas. For 3g, sadly I couldn't find anything anywhere near that price range and instead what I found was usually in the 40$ and up area.

In the USA, tmobile will be shutting down 2g in I think 2020, which is not that far off. Hence me wanting to get on 3g ASAP, but all solutions seem ridiculously expensive.

I haven't looked as 3g USB do goes in the past, they seem to be sub twenty dollars, but there is no way I am having my little micro with 8kb of ram run an entire host USB stack with enough resources left over for my code.

albert007_d2• 10 years ago

Here in Germany(or in India), its easy to find Huawei-E173 in the price range of 15 to 20 dollars, most of the time i just collect all those used usb-3g-sticks from ebay for a throwaway price of 4-8 dollars.

fakir• 10 years ago

Have you seen http://Starterkit.att.com ?

Would it be of value if the cellular shield was sold on its own separately ?

albert007_d2• 10 years ago

not sure what is the monthly pricing of this developer sim card. Here in Germany, i use fonic/congstar prepaid sim cards from the super market for 10euro's which comes with 10euro balance. These prepaid sim card's have a data plan of 100MB/30days for just 2Euros. In my xmpp based raspi-IoT solution 100MB per month is sufficient - hence my running cost of this IoT setup is around 2Euros/month.

Raspberry pi Zero and USB 3G internet and XMPP = awesome IoT device

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