Nordic Semiconductors announced that the Norwegian asset tracking specialist, Meshtech is introducing their environmental asset tracker that combines cellular IoT and Bluetooth wireless technologies with a five-year battery life. The Meshtech Cloud Tracker prevents the on-going compensation cost that is routinely incurred in the supply of perishable goods that are at risk of spoiling and/or being delivered to wrong customer locations or in the wrong quantities.
The Meshtech Cloud Tracker cannot only continuously monitor environmental parameters such as temperature, but also check whether a consignment has been dropped, tilted or folded, the location of individual shipping items (e.g. trolleys, pallets or boxes) within a consignment, the order in which they were loaded and unloaded, and the geographical location of the entire consignment anywhere in the world.
The new tracker has been designed for commercial and industrial perishable goods applications and is supplied in a ruggedized 113 x 110 x 19mm packages that weigh 195g. It has an inbuilt Hall effect magnetic sensor, temperature sensor, and 3-axis accelerometer. The device is powered by six internal 3.6V AA batteries and includes all necessary antennas (LTE and Bluetooth LE) and a pre-installed embedded SIM (eSIM card that can operate globally).
The usage of a Nordic nRF52811 SoC in the Meshtech Cloud Tracker helps it to communicate with other Bluetooth devices and specialist sensors. It can also have full native compatibility with another ultra low power wireless technologies such as Thread and Zigbee if required. The Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP has an integrated LTE-M/NB- IoT modem which is certified for global Cellular IoT applications.
It has a dedicated 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor application processor, 1 MB Flash and 256 KB RAM, an integrated RF front end and is supplied in a compact 10 x 16 x 1 mm package. A range of analog and digital peripherals are also included, plus it has automated power and clock management, Arm TrustZone for trusted execution, and Arm CryptoCell 310 for application-layer security. For more information, visit the official website of Nordic Semiconductors.
