Messages are extremely small and efficient OTA (highly optimized and compressed).
The API is JSON and messages are your own unconstrained JSON object, but they're transmitted as compressed binary. (You can also have a binary payload 'attachment' to a JSON message if you so choose.)
Although everything works fine if the messages are individually in the KB's, that's not the design center because of how we manage memory on our (STM32L4R5) MCU.
Things work most efficiently when the app uses lots of small messages. We buffer them in flash, and power-on the modem at user-settable intervals (or conditions) for upload.
The 500MB - is that per month - or once for the lifetime of the 10-year cell-"contract" of the card? (if once, how refill once depleted?)
THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS!.
(Also, while at Lockheed, our division was one of the early adopters of Groove. Sadly, we had factions who loved it and wanted to use it and factions who didnt want to change their workflows. -- As the head of IT, I liked it, although it had some quirks... it was too bad we didnt "find our groove" with Groove at the time. But the vision behind it was dope.)
I'd like to know how small a configuration with a Notecard + carrier can be?
For sewing into a kids backpack I think it looks like it will be small enough, but in my mind, putting a tracker inside a shoe would be much better. A backpack is easily forgotten or lost somewhere, but shoes tend to stay with the person. However, to put it in a shoe it'd have to be pretty small.
This is really cool, but I don’t see any information on costs if you go over the 500mb of cellular data. Probably missed it, but I did click around a lot trying.
My personal armchair worry is that it makes them likely to accept a dystopian surveillance society without even considering that it might be problematic.
Of course, this unreasonable fear of abductions means that a commercial GPS tracker for kids would sell much better if it supported the "abducted kid" use case well, on top of more likely use cases.
Unless you talk about the wilderness.
Actually when I let my kids go outside alone, I usually give them a phone. I live in a big city. Reception could be a problem in the countryside.
They would typically be worn by the child, and thus a good indicator of where your snowflake is.
But I want to use this to put on BIKES!
Are you thinking about theft tracking or some other use case?
Though I have to say I saw a youtube video recently (sorry to lazy to google it) where someone put an apple tracking device in a bike and was able to locate it after it was stolen.
Is this correct?
So I can make a GPS child tracker for my kids backpacks - and it would just cost the $50 -- EDIT, ah for 10 years.
This is wonderful.
We attempted to negotiate this in 2007 after leaving Lockheeds RFID division, and nobody would touch it :-( for our sensors.