The Hydrogen Ion
The Hydrogen Ion development board is an IoT multi-tool with multiple radios and support for several popular IoT protocols, including LoRa/LoRaWAN, Bluetooth LE 5.4, IEEE 802.15.4 (supports 6LoWPAN, OpenThread, Zigbee, etc), and GNSS and 2.4 GHz WiFi receivers for location applications.
The dev board includes:
- Nordic nRF52840 multiprotocol wireless SoC with an Arm Cortex-M4 processor and an integrated 2.4 GHz radio
- Semtech LR1110 LoRa radio (868/915 MHz) with low-power GNSS and WiFi scanning, and GNSS signal processing offload
- Nordic nPM1300 power management chip with battery charge controller, 100mA load switches, and programable 200mA voltage regulator
- Integrated 2.4GHz and GNSS chip antennas and U.FL ports for external Sub-GHz and GNSS antennas
- Motion sensor for ultra-low-power standby/wake-on-motion functionality
- USB TTY, SPI, I2C, GPIO interfaces, and 16Mbit FLASH.
The board is designed as a reference platform Hydrogen Protocol development and testing for use in US and EU markets (with support for 868/915 MHz bands). The full documentation, schematics, and manufacturing-ready design will be made available as an open hardware design under the CERN OHL Permissive v2 license once RF testing is completed.
The Hydrogen Plumbing project is manufacturing fully assembled dev boards for prototyping and use as RF sub-assemblies. A smaller FCC/CE certified module based on this design is planned for Spring 2024.
The antenna and RF circuitry on the Hydrogen Ion are undergoing final tuning and testing, and the devices will enter production in January 2024, with customer delivery by February 2024—pre-order boards by December 31st for the January production run.
Pre-Order the Hydrogen Ion »Hardware with batteries included
The Hydrogen Ion dev board includes a full embedded Rust SDK and a command line interface that supports device provisioning, network credential management, and firmware deployment.
hydrogen provision deviceassigning IPv6 address... 2001:db8:abcd:df:20c7:8ee4:2824:095f
generating device key pair...Done!building device bundle...Done!Done!hydrogen provision sidewalk --ip 20c7:8ee4:2824:095fprovisioning sidewalk device id...Done!adding sidewalk data to device bundle...Done!Done!hydrogen deploy --ip 20c7:8ee4:2824:095fflashing device bundle and firmware...Done!Device ready!Molecular Hydrogen
A Hydrogen Ion dev board with LTE Cat-M and NB-IoT support is under development, with a beta release planned for late winter 2024. This device extends the Hydrogen Ion base functionality, adding a Nordic nRF9161 with an Arm Cortex-M33 processor and a cellular radio with firmware-provisioned SoftSIMs and DECT NR+ support for mesh networks in the 1.9GHz band.