

Open Source All-in-One Wireless Development Board - kfihihc
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-ONE-p-2017.html

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sounds
Something to be careful about - MediaTek has a reputation of being very hard
to work with. As long as you're not trying to do anything beyond what Seeed
Studio has already provided for, not a problem.

But if you run into something where you need MediaTek's help, you're out of
luck.

Just hope I can save you that little discovery.

~~~
userbinator
I know that a lot of documentation and support can be obtained from various
Chinese sites, at least for MTK's phone SoCs. It's absolutely true that trying
to approach them "through the front door" will not yield anything worthwhile,
but the culture has found other means. If this one becomes popular, I expect
the same to happen.

On the bright side, at least it's not Broadcom.

~~~
ausjke
I start laughing when I saw the last sentence, in all my designs I tried to
avoid Broadcom as much as possible. Same as Marvell, you don't get anything
other than a two-page brief before you sign a NDA, and if you're not a volume
player, you normally don't get a chance to even sign the NDA.

Marvell is getting slightly better with docs, but still light-year behind TI
and Freescale, whose design docs are pretty much all publicly accessible.

~~~
swamp40
Broadcom seems to be easing up a bit with their introduction of their WICED
(pronounced Wicked) line of Bluetooth Smart and Wifi wireless modules.

\- $20 dev board keyfob that connects to an iPhone our of the box. \- lots of
firmware source code examples \- available iOS source code \- _free_ compiler
toolchain and USB programming \- open schematics and pcb files \- open forum:
[http://community.broadcom.com/](http://community.broadcom.com/)

As a designer, I know it's easy to have a bad experience with a particular
manufacturer and then avoid them like the plague in the future.

One time we designed in an Atmel TinyAVR into something, and as soon as we
finished it went completely out-of-stock for 12 months.

We had to throw the boards and firmware away and start from scratch again
using a PIC.

(We've never used another Atmel processor after that.)

But I try to remember that it's just a bias in my mind, and personal biases
don't always jibe with reality.

Rationally, I understand that Atmel's not a bad company just because they had
one supply chain glitch 7 years ago.

So my advice is: try to keep an open mind.

~~~
sounds
I absolutely agree. I'm kind of selfishly pleased that my comment triggered
you to share your war stories.

But I do hope that by publicly sharing what manufacturers are like to work
with it prods them to be more open to the community in the future.

Or if not, that at least I can steer designers toward those companies that are
easy to work with, and let market forces do the rest.

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mikegioia
I'm assuming not, but does anyone know if the wifi/gsm/baseband code is open
source? What benefit would having the GPS/SOC hardware data sheets provide if
the firmware code is closed?

~~~
bravo22
For GSM the baseband code is always closed. It is often loaded into the
module. Part of a modular approval for PTCRB (as well as FCC/CE) is that the
end user can't change the power and radiation profile of the device. This is
one reason why the source is closed.

What you'd normally care about is the protocol to talk to that baseband. 9/10
for M2M applications it is the 3GPP AT Commands and PPP therefore you can
pretty much use PPP dialer to talk to it.

~~~
mikegioia
Ahh I see. Thank you, you gave me a bunch of fun new things to google.

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radagast
I recommend looking at the CELLv1 from SparqEE[1] if anyone is looking for a
nice development board for RaspberryPi/Arduino. It supports 3G, not only GPRS
as most of the other GSM boards available.

I received mine a few weeks ago and have been having loads of fun working with
it.

[1] [http://www.sparqee.com/portfolio/sparqee-
cell/](http://www.sparqee.com/portfolio/sparqee-cell/)

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Wells_Tu
LinkIt ONE integrates with 8 key features,ARM7 EJ-S™, GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth BR/EDR/BLE, GPS, Audio codec, and SD card,which GPRS,GSM,Wifi
functions can be used for IoT prototype,for wearables,BLE ,GPS,Audio are too
important to without.I guess someone who have played Arduino can operate this
board easily,now what I care is the software it supports.

~~~
Wells_Tu
Perhaps the resources column in linkit one
page([http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-
ONE-p-2017.html](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-ONE-p-2017.html))
show us something to get started

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kumarski
This turns your android into a the same type of shield.

[http://1sheeld.com](http://1sheeld.com)

~~~
kfihihc
It diffrent from 1Sheeld, LinkIt includes GPS/GPRS and runs an RTOS. So, you
can make it work outside.

~~~
kumarski
I see. Both look worth having.

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sjuut
This looks really interesting for e.g. tracking devices

~~~
scoot
There are plant of those available off-the-shelf from your favourite Chinese
e-tailer (or eBay):
[http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+tracker](http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+tracker)

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billLiu
Cool

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biggy
Marvel! Name it Hunger ¡ jajajaja

