AT&T IoT Starter Kit Powered by AWS

As stated by other review this is easy to get setup as there is a 45 page guide that takes you step by step. Notes: There is 5 separate accouts you have to build. Key Item: No Support for this device or service unless it a forum or chat. It turns out my board was defective and and I have started the return of the board which a feat in itself since there is no actual support number and it all is done via chat.

What I like about cellular LTE I'm surprised I didn't discover this kit earlier, but AT&T has done a great job packaging everything you need to get started with IoT over the AT&T LTE cellular network. Most of my previous IoT experience revolves around WiFi. The proliferation of WiFi solutions over the past few years has made it relatively easy to connect whatever you're building to the Internet. Problem is, what happens when you're not around WiFi? And even when you are, it's often difficult to get it WiFi configured half the time. If I'm at home or work - great. Anywhere else, I often end up carrying around an LTE hotspot to "bridge" my WiFi connection over a consistently reliable network. Replacing WiFi in my projects with LTE (or using it along with WiFi) always seemed like a great solution, but I had always thought it would cost too much. Besides that, how would I get it all to work? That's why I'm excited about this kit. It pulls everything I need together in one kit; and, it's relatively easy on the pocketbook. Tell me about the starter kit Now that I've covered why I like the idea of IoT over cellular, let's get down to talking about the kit itself. As I mentioned before, it's got everything you need to get started. - NXP Cortex-M4 Freedom board (FRDM-K64F) -- I can see why they picked this board. It has quite a few built-in sensors and quite a few other nice features (Ethernet, micro SD, etc). -- Supported with the ARM mbed tools, which means you don't necessarily have to install any tools on your computer. - LTE cellular modem plug-on board - what makes this kit talk LTE -- The modem looks just like an Arduino shield, which matches the connectors on the NXP Freedom board. -- It even fits my Arduino Uno, although I haven't found an Arduino library for it, yet. - AT&T SIM card that plugs into the modem board. - Two antennas and a USB power cable that attaches to the modem board. - microSD card If you've ever used NXP microcontrollers or any processor supported by ARM mbed, you'll feel right at home. But that said... everyone should be able to get the AWS quickstart demo running, even if you've never done any hands-on development before. Like Amazon's IoT Dash Button, this kit lets you quickly start pushing buttons and viewing IoT data in the AWS cloud. Of course, basing this kit on the NXP development board means we can take IoT to another level. Not only does the NXP board include a number of built-in sensors, but being a broadly supported MCU development board, the web contains lots of code and examples for extending this kit. If there's something you want your IoT "thing" to do, you can probably make it happen with a kit like this. So we've talked about the "thing", i.e. the AT&T IoT Starter Kit. But there's also another side to IoT. We've already mentioned that AT&T provides examples connecting to Amazon's Web services (AWS), but they also have examples for Azure and their own IoT platform. Of course, they like to show off their AT&T Flow tools and their M2x data storage, but these actually work quite well - especially for those of us who are more experienced with the "thing" side of IoT. These tools make it easy to get the cloud-side portion of your project up-and-running very quickly. It will still help to know a little bit of javascript, but you don't need to worry about all the other cloud tech speak (load-balancing servers and whatnot) in order to get something running. (Of course, I'm sure it's even easier for those who know that stuff.) The good, the bad, and one ugly There's much to like here and it's worth putting up with a few minor problems, in my opinion, so that I can IoT over cellular LTE. Let me address the "ugly" first. The NXP FRDM-K64F board has problems with Windows 10. (Oh, why didn't I use my Mac, to begin with?) Generally, I'm fine with either O/S, but Windows 8 and 10 can apparently mess these boards up. Just check the forums, it's apparently a known thing. What happens? When you plug the NXP board into your computer it mounts just like USB drive (named "MBED"). It's a great idea since you can write binary programs to the board just like you would copy them to a USB drive. Problem is, Windows 10 indexing apparently messes up the interface. My board (finally) runs with both Mac or Windows 10 computers, but not without a lot of frustration. Stay with Windows 7 or use a Mac and you'll skip the ugly. (I haven't tried Linux yet, so I can't speak to it.) There are forum messages that can help you "fix" your board by updating the firmware using a Windows 7 computer. (Now that I know the procedure, I'm curious to try it from my Mac. But my board's not 'broken' anymore.) Setting ugly aside, the bad really isn't that bad. (I just like the good, bad, and ugly movie reference.) It's just a little bit difficult sifting through the provided tutorials to figure out where to start. You can find the documentation under the "Develop" menu of the http://marketplace.att.com page. Based on my stumbling around trying things out, here's where I would suggest others should start: 1. Begin with "Quick Start with IoT Starter Kit and AWS" tutorial. Not only is this the most foolproof way to get started, but you get to see your data in the Amazon cloud. -- This tutorial doesn't tell you how to "hook up" the hardware, but you can peek into my 2nd suggestion to find that info. -- You also have to know how to write binary program files to the board, but as I said earlier, that's pretty easy to figure out. 2. Next, try out the generic "Getting Started with the AT&T IoT Starter Kit". -- It's a bit confusing (at least as I write this) because there are more than one Getting Started guides, but this tutorial gives you a chance to dig further into the kit as well as trying out the server-side AT&T Flow tools. The example is a bit long and complicated, but it's fun when you get all the way through it. (Hopefully, you can copy/paste better than me. I hate it when I make stupid mistakes!) Based on the fact the web page has been changing over the last week, it looks like they're in the process of updating the website and tutorials. It's nice to see them working to improve things. Bottom line, if you've stuck with me this far, is that I didn't know that IoT over cellular LTE was so cheap and easy to use.