Thank you for your continued support! We’re excited to share the key improvements in the Conexio Stratus Pro PCB design over the first-generation Stratus device. Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work enhancing our design and we’re thrilled to present these upgrades to you. With these enhancements, the Conexio Stratus Pro stands out as a powerful and versatile cellular IoT platform, offering unmatched connectivity, future-proofing, and seamless integration with leading IoT platforms.

Design Improvements and Additions

nPM1300 Integration

• Fuel Gauging: Accurate battery-capacity indication is crucial for any battery-powered device. Traditional voltage-based readings can be misleading, especially under variable load conditions. The Stratus Pro now includes a dedicated nPM1300 fuel gauge, providing precise state-of-charge (SoC), voltage, and current consumption readings. This ensures better detection of cell aging and improves overall measurement accuracy, preventing unexpected shutdowns.

• Power Management and Charging: The nPM1300 PMIC efficiently manages battery charging via any USB Type-C connection. With USB Power Delivery (PD) support, the battery charges faster at up to 800mA. Additionally, the nPM1300 provides variable voltage outputs (1.8 V, 3.3 V, 5 V, VBAT) for powering external sensors and devices.

Passive GPS Antenna

• Compact and Lightweight: Often, we have seen ceramic active GPS antennas that are bulky, expansive, heavy, and inflexible, making it harder to integrate them into smaller devices or cases. To address this issue, we have now integrated a GNSS low-noise amplifier (LNA) onboard the Stratus Pro that allows connecting passive GPS antennae such as Molex LTE/GPS Combo Flexible Antenna to the kit.

• Power Conservation: In addition, we have also enabled in hardware a way to turn ON or OFF the GPS LNA when not in use to conserve power. Stay tuned for the full GNSS sample application which will demonstrate how to control and get GNSS coordinates using our SDK.

SWD Programming and Debugging

• Cost-Effective Debugging: While Stratus Pro supports programming over USB-C or over-the-air (OTA) using Zephyr’s DFU, we’ve included an SWD interface for deeper firmware debugging and troubleshooting. Toward this end, we had two choices: either include the Tag Connect footprint or the SWD interface. We chose the latter as the Tag Connect cables are expensive. SWD/JTAG cables are affordable and, with a JTAG/SWD programmer like the nRF5340 DK (around $50), users can easily program and debug their applications using Nordic tools such as nRF Connect for VS Code.

In other News

In other news, we are happy to announce that the Stratus Pro device has been recently featured by CNX Software, Geeky Gardgets, and Electronics-lab.

That’s all we got for this week, see you next. Thank you!

-Rajeev