extrowerk tells us about a new hacker-friendly device – a $20 LTE modem stick with a quadcore CPU and WiFi, capable of running fully-featured Linux distributions. This discovery hinges on a mountain of work by a Chinese hacker [HandsomeYingYan], who’s figured out this stick runs Android, hacked its bootloader, tweaked a Linux kernel for it and created a Debian distribution for the stick – calling this the OpenStick project. [extrowerk]’s writeup translates the [HandsomeYingYan]’s tutorial for us and makes a few more useful notes. With this writeup in hand, we have unlocked a whole new SBC to use in our projects – at a surprisingly low price!
There’s so much computing power in cheap, disposable technology these days, and you can do fun things with it.
I’ve been using very low cost low energy MCUs for many years to mostly build PoE type sensors and all types of data collection or control type devices. Mostly PIC or ESP as they are widely available and very low cost. But the capabilities of the new IIoT era gadgets is crazy, ESP32 / RP2040 are serious devices, calling them an MCU is almost derogatory, and they now have built in energy efficiency and management which means you can have a powerful computing capability on demand and off-grid / even isolated / hardened if required ( think intrinsically safe / hazardous ).
Now I have colleagues going a step further, to produce fully 3D printed polymer MCUs that can be application specific, low cost and recyclable, even ingestible and can be printed onto just about any available substrate, solid or flexible!
Imagine what you can do when the whole available inner surface of your refrigerator door or panel is now a polymer printed circuit, Think about what this can do for other large scale devices, cars, bus, train, ship, spacecraft! Who needs miniaturisation it’s so yesterday!
Circuit boards that can be applied in situ, or attached like a self-adhesive label! That you print on demand from a schematic.
The hardware we have today is awesome in every way! I can think of many neat applications for LTE devices that cannot be filled by wifi. However data plans are a bigger barrier for ubiquitous wide area networking than the actual hardware. Even with very low data usage the cost of a data plan quickly adds up. If you want to hookup a couple of devices, the service costs can become depressingly expensive.
The “5G” revolution came with loads of hype about everything being hooked up. But in order to meaningfully use it for widespread IoT the costs still have to come down dramatically.
@Alfman
Agreed.
Most of what I do is commercial / corporate, in this regard the cost of operating on publicly accessible networks is largely irrelevant as the data is locally processed and consolidated. The hidden power of many modern devices being the ability to curate before transmission, in a very short period of time the individual device required bandwidth has fallen despite increased resolution. But of course there are now many many more devices.
On the commercial side 5G isn’t really a consideration, it is a promise without any real demand, and I cannot see it displacing private networks in the short term.
However, on the domestic end users often have high bandwidth available via the ISP, the chatter of a few dozen gadgets won’t be noticed at the consumer end, however for the ISP the accumulated cost will be a burden. I appreciate this might well be dependant on the quality of device and network design.
It will be interesting to see where it all ends.
cpcf,
Agreed. I actually think “bandwidth” in today’s consumer packages would already be good enough provided we could distribute the bandwidth across all our devices. The problem is we can’t do that (not without a wifi hotspot to create a LAN). On top of bandwidth used, consumers have to pay a considerable per device fee. What we need for 5G to be truly viable for IoT is the ability to buy bandwidth in bulk and then connect ALL our devices without being billed for each device (ie a fridge, toaster, tv,, lights, car, etc). Alas nobody offers this with 5G to my knowledge and until they do 5G can not supplant wifi.
As far as chatter goes, a lot of that comes down to the NAT traversal that developers are forced to deal with today. Many routers close sessions within a couple minutes. Even an “idle” device has to do pings continuously or that NAT session may be closed. And like you say every device ends up multiplying this chatter. Prior to NAT routing this wasn’t a problem. Even an hour between pings could be enough as long as you held onto the IP.
The consequences of NAT have been disastrous for the prospects of a P2P internet and P2P IoT. Rather than direct peer to peer connections between devices, now everything today is designed to phone home to a centralized service provider, ugh. My local ISP still doesn’t support IPv6 so the prospect of every device being addressable is as distant as ever.
@Alfman.
Coincidentally I came across this very issue recently related to ICS or Bridged Connections on Win 10. A odd setup with multiple PC connected to a small switch sharing a WiFi connection of a single workstation. Apparently this is a configuration often used in education to give the teacher’s workstation full control of internet access. All of a sudden the PCs started losing internet access, they had static IP, no change in the DNS, everything looked good. It came to pass the timeout is now hard coded into the energy saving credentials / parameters, so much so that a keep alive doesn’t even function anymore in certain hardware / security configurations, and I stumbled across one such mix of Win 10, HP SFF PCs and Cisco WAPs. Just 5 minutes of nothing but pings and the shared connections were dropped, to get things to stay working I had to change network drivers, apply a registry hack and alter the WAP security profile.
cpcf,
I think the last time I used ICS/bridge connections was with win2k, haha. I’m surprised people still use windows for this instead of a dedicated router, but I guess it makes sense if that’s all they know or maybe they don’t have a budget and they can recycle windows computers they already have.
https://www.lifewire.com/best-parental-control-routers-4160776
That sucks, I wonder why they would do that. It defeats the whole point of keep alive pings. I suspect it breaks a lot of applications.
@Alfman.
At first I just accepted it was energy management, use it or lose it, almost Eco-Fanaticism, every bit being a bunch of photons somebody has to generate somewhere somehow. But when I sat back and thought about this I now suspect it’s about security dressed up in an environmental excuse, I noticed a lot of the changes were bundled with patches around the time the early versions of TLS bit the dust. Someone in some deep dark corner of the internet will know why.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a keep alive audit, what is the energy budget for a global ping mania? Actually, it’s probably easy to calculate, you can wiretap your local network for a short period of time, collect the ping stats and apply it to the global picture. I bet it shocks everyone!