New to Spark Fun, advice for a 4g, gps, arduino, rpi setup

Wireless & IoT Cellular
1

Hi,

I am a software engineer that is interested in getting into embedded programming with AWS IoT and a thing device. For my “thing”, I was interested in using a sara-r4 shield( https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136) and the high precision zed f9 module (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15087) with an arduino nano. I was wanting to use a rasberry pi 3 as a sbc to allow me to use amazon sdk to communicate with the AWS IoT. Is this a viable setup? Is it reasonable?

Thanks.

John

2

Hi John,

The SARA R4 Shield and ZED-F9P should work just fine with an Arduino Nano. You probably will not need to look at getting a more powerful Arduino since both peripherals should handle most of the heavy lifting but if you plan to write code using the Arduino libraries for both the SARA R4 shield and ZED-F9P, you may run out of program memory space on the Nano.

As for the Amazon SDK and AWS IoT services, I cannot speak to how well that will work as we do not have any products or tutorials available that use either of those services but you should be able to at least send serial data from the Nano to your Pi for use there.

I hope this helps you get started on your project. If you have any other questions about the SARA-R4 Shield or the ZED-F9P, let us know and we would be happy to help as much as we can.

3

Hi Mark, thank you for your previous reply. I am sorry to change things on you, but I am now leaning toward using a rasberry pi 4 now with the same sara-r4 shield, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14997, and the zed-f9 module, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136 , that spark fun offers. They will connect via the two usb ports, correct? Also, the sara-r4 shield from you guys offer can come with a Hologram sim card. I don’t have to send the data through their network , but can instead send a mqtt message directly to AWS IoT like here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/ … step3.html .

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So, I called Hologram and they said that it is possible to just send mqtt message directly to your AWS IoT cloud account and not use their private network and cloud. If you could verify that the two usb connections would work, that would be great. Because I am using two usb connections and not stacking these modules using pins, what is the best way to cleanly mount everything to take up the least amount of space. I am just looking for your suggestions as I know this is a subjective question. Thank Mark. Sincerely, John

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Hi John,

Thanks for sharing that info from Hologram. I’m sure other users will benefit from that information. As for connecting both of these directly to a Pi 4 via USB, I know the SARA-R4 will work as outlined [here in our Hookup Guide for the shield. The ZED-F9P should also work (there may be some weird driver issues you need to work through) but also be aware that the configuration software, [u-center is currently only compatible with Windows so if you intend to use that to configure your ZED-F9P, you will need to do so on a machine running Windows.](u-center)](LTE Cat M1/NB-IoT Shield Hookup Guide - SparkFun Learn)