I’m happy to introduce a new Notecarrier that will improve your experience developing wirelessly-connected IoT solutions with the Notecard (and frankly, it also just looks really cool).
To quote Apple’s Tim Cook, “I think you’re gonna love it.”
Skip over to the Notecarrier-A datasheet, buy a Notecarrier-A, or read on for more details.
The Notecarrier, Now in Black
The Notecarrier-A maintains the same form factor as the previous Notecarrier-A line (i.e. the AL, AE, and AA). Rest assured if you were embedding any of these in your project, the Notecarrier-A will fit in perfectly.
While the black Wi-Fi Notecard fits well into the new color scheme, the Cellular Notecard works with the new Notecarrier-A equally as well.
Aside from the dramatic black PCB, there are two other important changes in the Notecarrier-A:
New Antennas
The new Notecarrier-A has switched antennas to the Ignion NN03-310. Why? Well this was one of the most critical pieces of feedback we received from customers: the GPS performance of the previous Notecarriers just wasn’t adequate. With the new Ignion antennas, cellular performance is just as good as before and the GPS performance has proven to be >= 5dB better in our testing. This results in faster GPS fixes, including improving TTFF (Time to First Fix) from what was > 120 seconds to < 60 seconds.
Qwiic Ports
Everyone’s favorite peripheral connector is now on the Notecarrier-A! We’ve added two Qwiic ports to provide solder-free expansion of your IoT solution for communication over I2C.
If you haven’t used them before, Qwiic connectors are daisy-chainable and polarized so you can be certain your connection is correct the first time.
What About Notecarrier-AL/AE/AA?
The new Notecarrier-A helps to simplify our offerings and is a replacement for the AL, AE, and AA Notecarriers. However, we will absolutely continue to support those Notecarriers going forward.
The Notecarrier-A retains the connectors on the back if you want to solder your own AA battery harness as well.
Next Steps
- You can read more technical details in the Notecarrier-A datasheet.
- Buy your own Notecarrier-A on the Blues Wireless store.
