Pico LTE Powered by Raspberry Pi | DIY IoT Projects | Raspberry Pi Pico W | Quectel BG95-M3 | Bluetooth 5.2 / Wi-Fi | Arm Cortex-M0+ | RP2040 | Global LTE CAT-M1 and GPRS | Home Automation

Item works as described. It’s a Pico W + cellular all on one board. I was able to connect over cellular and talk to AWS within a few hours.Quality seems good. The 2 QWIIC connectors are going to be helpful for what I’m building.I would and will be buying again.

Would've helped to know that the SIM they chose to run with is Data Only. I can probably tolerate that for prototyping for the project I'm working on here, but it would've factored into what I bought had I known. No C/C++ SDK for the hardware either, just MicroPython. Another DING. If you can live with data only and MicoPython or have the moxie to handle rolling your own RaspberryPI Pico SDK for C/C++ for _RELIABILITY_ you should be okay with this. Will update this review as time progresses and I find out more on this board.Board looks to be an all-inclusive system with the Antenna appearing to be a part of the nice looking module. No SIM needed for the unit- you use their service. Global data options and the rates seem fairly reeasonable for Cat-M1 or Cat-NB. It's for this reason they get any appreciable Stars. They LOST two out of box from what would've been a 5 star review at this juncture because of the lack of SMS support- which is something that makes a TON of sense for this class of device. But, I suspect they did that to ensure maximum service fees to them (The lack thereof is annoying and verges on _inexcusable_ (C'mon, Sixfab...Pi's aren't LOW POWER compared to the Pico!!)) because you need to use the more expensive data service. I needed both, to be honest- I don't want/need to be delivering messages for these things if I can at-all help it. MicroPython is, "fine," for relatively adequate values of prototyping- but if one is to make a real mission/life critical product using this stuff, you CAN'T realistically rely on a _SCRIPTING_ language for this sort of stuff. (Again, c'mon Sixfab...you can't realistically DO that, guys...not on this class of product!!!)As a result of these two issues (and they ARE issues...) I took two stars off of what should've been a really spectacular product on their part. If I can't get a C/C++ api cobbled together for this (The info isn't there or I've got to spend carving one out of the MicroPython stuff...) it'll drop two more on an update.If you're putzing about- this looks like a good deal. Might even be great. As something for much more serious use- move on. Find something else, sadly. This isn't it. Not even close.[Edit]Two more stars lost. Woeful documentation that's hard to figure out. Garish animated gifs that "show" what you're expected to do, but no translation to the task at hand for things like AWS use, etc. I got the demo working. I got it to change, but that was my own 4+ decades of engineering skills that let me do this. But then, when I tried to get to sending SMS messages...nope...money involved and in ways with a fragile Web-centric system to do it with. Nope not going to do this. People will get hurt and killed over trying to make this work.

This board works. Do not buy the Freenove board. This one works!!

It took me a VERY long time to get around to writing this review because I couldn't find a good use case for it right away. The product comes with one year of data (actually it seems to be 1GB of data and a $12 credit to cover your SIM fee for the first 12 months).Setup was spotty at first - I wanted to use this with an i2c temperature/humidity monitor, and have it publish to a public MQTT broker so I could check it from my phone with an MQTT client app.I have some Python experience, but I also do most of my coding in Microsoft VS Code with the PlatformIO plugin. I have used this extensively with ESP32/ESP8266 and other development boards. As far as I can tell, this isn't an option for this PicoLTE board. You need to use the Thonny IDE (which is fine as a "beginner" interface, but it pales in comparison to the VS Code/PlatformIO combination).I managed to get it to work intermittently, but sometimes it would appear to be running but wasn't publishing data as it should. I thought it might be because I have weak cellular coverage at my house for some providers, so I brought it to work with me and I struggled with it there, too.Eventually I took a different approach in my code, and got it to work reliably. My first concern was how much data this would use at various update intervals, so I ended up setting it up to publish data once per minute - publishing temperature, humidity, and a cellular signal strength value to an MQTT broker.I logged into the Sixfab website and used it to check the hourly data usage. I was happy to see that the the max usage in a given hour was .037MB. This would equate to 0.888MB/day or 26.64MB/month or about 320MB/year. This would keep me well below the 1GB data allowance for that first year.I'm honestly not sure if I will continue to use this after that point. It can work as a WiFi dev board too - I tried that out first before I even activated the LTE side online. I later learned that the application that I wanted to run this with could be piggybacked on a Raspberry Pi I already had running.I will still keep this running (24/7) in a custom 3D printed case that I designed for it and the sensor breakout board I connected. I'm attaching a couple of photos of it mounted in this housing.I think this could be a killer little board if I could program it with my preferred IDE. I'm giving it 4 stars...I would give 5 if there was a way to use VS Code/PlatformIO with it.

Requires subscription to their service which I didn't expect. I tested with AWS IoT and it worked ok. Not sure about the amount data I will need but for low data volume of iot standard service may be sufficient. I only tested with the trial sub thus far.

There are no real world examples and the integrations in the SDK are very limited. I recommend looking at Blues.com as an alternative.