Notecard Lora compatibility with other Notecards

Firmware
1

Hi All,

So I have been setting up the Notecard Lora and one of my first experiments was to simply drop it into one of my exiting projects in place of an existing cellular card.

I wanted to know if there is already a document which outlines any non compatible api calls or other gotcha’s when moving a project over to the Lora Notecard ?

I have already noticed that a call to card.carrier, which I use to retrieve the charging status, fails with

[ERROR] unknown or unsupported request type: card.carrier {not-supported}{io}

Second thing I have noticed is that none of my notes have been transmitted yet. It seems from the messages I am seeing that templates are required when using the Lora Notecard. Can someone confirm this ?

Thanks,
Serge

2

OK I already found one answer here:

https://dev.blues.io/notecard/notecard-walkthrough/low-bandwidth-design/

So this confirms that templates are required when working with the Lora Notecards.

Would be great to have all the items compiled as a short read somewhere.

Thanks,
Serge

3

Hey @ssozonoff,

Thanks that’s really good feedback! I’ve logged this and I’ll see what I can do.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already I’d recommend going through the Notecard LoRa quickstart, as it goes through the need for templates and talks about some of the differences when working with LoRa: Notecard LoRa Quickstart - Blues Developers.

The two big differences with Notecard LoRa are that both Notes and environment variables must be templated. This is mostly to save on bandwidth as you have to be pretty stingy with data when operating over LoRa / LoRaWAN.

There are also a few APIs that aren’t supported because the Notecard LoRa doesn’t have some of the components the other Notecards do. For example, there’s no accelerator or GPS/GNSS module on Notecard LoRa, so the APIs around card.motion and card.location have restrictions.

Probably the easiest way to get a full sense of what is supported and what isn’t on LoRa is to look through the Notecard API reference: Notecard API Introduction - Blues Developers. All APIs throughout that reference are tagged to indicate which APIs are supported on LoRa and which are not.

TJ

1 Like
4

Great thanks.

So to code some logic for this on the Host side I am assuming I could base it off a call to “card.version” to decide what Notecard is being used.

Serge

5

At the moment short of using the “sku” response member there does not seem to be much else to go on. Do you have a list somewhere of the sku’s ?

Thanks,
Serge

6

Yep, the SKU from card.version is the best thing to go on. We have them all listed on Notecard Product Family - Blues Developers.

Although as I type this it looks like we list NOTE-LORA for the SKU there when really we should say NOTE-LWUS / NOTE-LWEU. I’ll get that cleaned up.

TJ

7

Hi,

Thanks for that. I had a look at the product family list. I seem to have a device reporting an SKU of NOTE-NBGL500 which is not in your list.

Screenshot 2024-03-08 at 09.02.27
Screenshot 2024-03-08 at 09.02.271544×536 42.6 KB

Thanks,
Serge

8

Woah that’s really weird. I have multiple NBGL Notecard that I just checked and they all have a SKU of NOTE-NBGL-500 (extra dash), which is in the table.

Screenshot 2024-03-08 at 9.30.53 AM
Screenshot 2024-03-08 at 9.26.04 AM

I’ll see what I can figure out.

TJ

9

Hi TJ,

Does not affect me on my end but I just wanted to point this out.

Thanks,
Serge