All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Connect series. Thank you for joining us. If this is your first time here, this is a series where we go over some of the great and exciting connectivity technologies coming out. We also have a podcast, so make sure to check that out. 

I'm really excited today. We have a special guest, Nicholas from RadioCrafts. He's the sales and marketing coordinator there. He's going to talk about some new technology in the low-power wireless space, and also some of the things he's doing. Thanks for joining us, Nicholas. 

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you guys today about MIOTY. 

Awesome, yeah. So first and foremost, tell us a little bit about RadioCrafts, who you are, what you do, and then we'll jump into some technology-specific discussion. 

So RadioCrafts is a radiofrequency module and network solution provider. We have sold over three million modules globally around the world, and we provide standard modules, such as Wireless M-Bus, ZigBee, SIGFOX. And then we have our own solutions, as well, like our IP Mesh solution, industrial IoT solutions, as well. And then we also offer, like, customizable modules, as well, so yeah, we do a wide variety of radio module customization, and standard modules for the global market. 

OK, yeah, great. Yeah, makes sense. And you mentioned this in the intro a little bit, but we're here to talk about MIOTY and how TI and RadioCrafts are partnering on this exciting new technology. Now, first of all, I'm really curious if you can tell me what MIOTY is, but second of all, can you spell it? Because I hear it pronounced and said a bunch of ways, but yeah. Give me a little intro to MIOTY. 

So the MIOTY solution was released in February of 2020 this year, and RadioCrafts released the solution as true stepping stone, into true IoT scalability and mass deployment, as well. And the what MIOTY is is that it was designed for the best-in-class reliability, scalability, and battery lifetime out of all existing LP1s today. 

And this is quite a bold statement, but it is possible because of a technology within MIOTY called Telegram Splitting, which basically, what this does is that you take MIOTY data packet, you split it into several subpackets, and then you send these subpackets in various different frequencies and times. And then the MIOTY base station will scan the spectrum for these MIOTY subpackets, and will receive these subpackets, and will create the complete message again. 

But what is truly amazing about MIOTY is the redundancy, which is possible with the Forward Error Correction feature in MIOTY, which allows you to lose up to 50% of your subpackets, and in the end, you can still form a complete message without losing any content information. So this really shows the robustness of MIOTY in the sense that even with the interference present, there is a level of redundancy and very strong interference blocking, which allows the MIOTY to be very resilient against noise and interferences. 

OK, wow. Yeah, that's very exciting. So it sounds like it's a new LPWAN standard. It runs on the sub gate band. And you know, you mentioned a couple of things-- robustness, resiliency against noise, some features that will make it very exciting. Can you talk about maybe some of the applications that you foresee this technology will be used for? 

Yeah, so the way RadioCraft sees this is that MIOTY will be use for mainly uplink-dominated use cases, and we see that it'll have an impact on projects with a very long project lifetime. And this is mainly due to the license-free bands, because as we see in the license-free bands, they're becoming quite crowded now with all the devices in these license-free bands, and all the different technologies, as well, which are coexisting in the license-free spectrum, and are creating a lot of interference between each other, but also just the noise and interference from the surrounding environment, as well. 

So then this can create a lot of interference and, therefore, a lot of data loss and packet loss, which MIOTY does not see this kind of packet loss and interference, because of this telegram-splitting technology, which allows it to be very resilient towards these external interferers. So we see that MIOTY is a very good use case for these long lifetime projects, as well as battery-operated devices, as well, because these subpackets-- they have very short air time of around 15 milliseconds. 

So then there is very little chance of data collision, and so we see that it is a very robust and battery-friendly solution because of the short air time, as well. And then we see it functioning very well in high note count volumes, as well-- high note count applications, such as, for example, smart metering, where you have a very dense amount of devices inside-- for example, each household-- which, in an urban environment, can be quite dense-- so we see that you can have up to, like, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of MIOTY devices which can send up to 1.5 million messages a day to a single gateway. 

So we see that very high note counts and very dense networks are quite good for MIOTY, as well. This includes Smart City, Smart Metering, Smart Building, as well, because you can have a very large building complex with various sensors in the building, for example, and then industry 4.0, as well. 

OK, yeah, makes sense. So it sounds like kind of large, scalable sensor networks, long lifetime, low power, and also kind of uplinks sensor-based communication. Yeah, it makes sense. Sounds very exciting. And what I've really been waiting for, Nicholas-- I know that you brought some hardware today. So can you walk us through that? Can we take a look? Can you talk about what's on there, what radio, and show us that? 

So here we have the MIOTY module, which is the world's first completely shielded MIOTY module by RadioCrafts. And this module is pre-certified for European regulations in the 868 megahertz band, and soon to come, the 915 megahertz band, as well, for US. And the module has been designed for really massive IoT deployments because of the feature sets in MIOTY. This module has the MIOTY protocol embedded inside. 

And we see that this MIOTY module also has a UART interface and AT command sets, where the AT command set is used to set up the module, and also to send data from the module to the MIOTY base station, as well. And so this module has many interesting features, from the multi-technology which is embedded in the module, so we see that it has a very long range of 20 kilometers line of sight, and 5 kilometers in an urban environment. 

So then it can be used, for example, in a large building complex, or in mining or oil field, and there will be no problems. And then we also see many other benefits from the MIOTY protocol itself-- for example, the high interference proof because of the telegram splitting and the redundancy, the ability to lose up to 50% of subpackets, and still be able to have a complete message with all the information still available when the message reaches the gateway. 

We also see that it has bi-directional communication for firmware upgrades, as well. And yeah, a very high sensitivity, as well, which provides the long range. So there are many benefits to the module which I have spoken before about, and when I introduced MIOTY, as well. And also, it uses TI chipsets, which is similar to all our modules. All our modules have a TI chipset inside, which Nick will elaborate on, I guess. 

Yeah, thanks. No, the module looks great. It's very exciting to see that, and I can't wait to get my hands on one myself to play with. And I just think it's really cool. I know that we've had a long partnership with RadioCrafts, and I think it's really cool to see this new technology coming onto the market, and how we're working together with the TI radios and your expertise with these modules. So it's very exciting-- something that I'm really enjoying watching develop. One last question for you, Nicholas-- so how can somebody get started with this technology, if they want to start with your module, or evaluating? 

OK, so here we have MIOTY development kit, which was designed for the customer to quickly and easily create a wireless link or a wireless network in which they can have a really good analysis of the network performance-- in this case, the MIOTY network performance. And inside the development kit, we have two development boards from RadioCrafts, and the development board comes with a MIOTY module on it, as well. 

And then we have two antennas and two USB sticks-- or not USB sticks, USB cables-- in which you can create a small wireless network for MIOTY, and really get to test the capabilities of MIOTY to see if it's right for your application. And we recommend to all our customers that they get a development kit in the evaluation phase of the product, because it is the fastest and easiest way to really test the network and see if MIOTY is for their application or not. 

And we also have a second MIOTY module, which I forgot to mention before, which is coming out as well in the end of the year in 2020. And the customer is going to be able to create his own customer-specific application, which he can run on the module itself. And this is based on RadioCraft's Easy framework, which is, in the simplest terms, it is to tailor the module's behavior to the customer's exact unique requirements through, for example, configuring the radio network, configuring the hardware interfaces, and configuring when to read and write to those hardware interfaces, as well. So that's something to look forward to, as well. 

And that module will also come with its own development kit, which will contain two sensor boards, which have 7 industry-standard sensors on it, such as two temperature and humidity sensors, accelerometer, Hall detector, LED, and among others. So that allows you, also, to interface to these different sensors, and to really test the second MIOTY module, which we will be releasing, as well. 

Well, Nicholas, that's very exciting. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you joining us here to talk about MIOTY. Very exciting to see where this new LPWAN protocol goes, and how we continue to partner with you, RadioCrafts, to help bring this to market with consumers. 

Thank you for having me on the show. 

For all of the viewers, thank you guys for joining us, as well. As always, make sure to tune in. We have more exciting and new topics coming up, and don't forget to check out the podcast, as well. Thanks Nicholas. Thanks everybody. Bye.