The Peanut Butter Cup of Cellular

Do you remember those great Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials in which two people are separately eating chocolate and peanut butter and then they collide and create something utterly amazing? I have a related story that is a little closer to home but very similar. For the last few years my family has hosted a foreign exchange student. Last year we had a girl and this year we have a boy from Austria. After experiencing Halloween the American way, he got home, opened up his bag, and poured the candy on the table. He looked at his stash of candy but did not recognize everything. He cautiously picked through the pile and selected an orange package that was square in shape. He carefully unwrapped it and looked at it. He could tell that it was some type of chocolate, but other than that he did not know. He pulled the cup out from the paper wrapper and took a small bite not knowing what to expect. You should have seen his reaction. In an instant his face went from caution to pure joy and he remarked. “This is amazing!” He had just tried a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup for the first time ever, and his reaction was just like those commercials.

Well, Digi has done this exact thing with their Xbee® Cellular products. Digi took their Xbee form factor and created both a module and a kit. These products paired it up with Certified 4G LTE Cat 1 technology for immediate designing and implementation. So what does this actually mean to you and me?

First, for those that don’t know Digi, they are headquartered in Minnesota and are a 30+-year-old company that specializes in connecting the world. As their slogan goes, “Connect with Confidence”. They are the experts in both wired and wireless communications. From their portfolio they have a family of wireless products called Xbee.

Xbee is a module form factor that came out in the mid ‘80s for RF applications. The modules are a little bit larger than the size of a quarter. Past Xbee modules were based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which ZigBee and Thread specifications are under, in frequencies of 868 MHz, 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz. Traditional Xbees are low power with a simple configuration for set up.

Digi XBee® 4G Cellular LTE Cat 1 Modem

Cellular is the technology used in your smart phone to communicate with each other. Smart phones are migrating from G3 to G4 to handle the increased data needs. This technology is overkill and to cost prohibitive for Internet of Things (IoT) communications or Machine to Machine (M2M) connections. With 4G LTE Cat 1 you now have cellular capabilities at much lower operating cost, which makes it an ideal solution for industrial uses of IoT and M2M. The module and kit are Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and Verizon end device certified. This saves you time and money developing a data cellular product since all the certifications have been done for you.

Now when you combine Digi’s Xbee and Cellular together you get 30+ years of Digi excellence in a small package that has huge communication implications. Just think about this for a moment. Let’s say you have multiple sensors at your home or office or factory and it uploads data as needed to the cellular cloud for immediate access. You no longer need to go from sensor to transmitter to receiver to modem to the cellular cloud. You can now go straight from sensor to XBee Cellular to Cellular Cloud. This is amazing. Xbee Cellular is that peanut butter cup of the RF world.