May 31, 2024

Teardown Session 44: Rajeev Piyare from Conexio

Sponsored by Nordic Community Hub

A showcase of leading-edge wireless technologies that connect our world.

Many thanks to this Teardown Session’s sponsor: Nordic Semiconductor!

In this Teardown Session, Crowd Supply’s Helen Leigh talks with Rajeev Piyare from Conexio, the creators of the Conexio Stratus and the soon-to-come Conexio Blitz and Conexio Stratus Pro cellular IoT prototyping platforms.

Key Moments

00:19 Crowd Supply News and What’s New
05:31 Introducing Rajeev
06:44 About Conexio and the Stratus origins
07:46 The use case that inspired a product
09:50 Manufacturing challenges during the chip shortage
11:29 Changing a design midway through a Crowd Supply campaign
12:50 Shipping catastrophe!
14:40 Stratus Pro compared to original Stratus
15:09 The new Nordic NRF 9161 has advantages
17:10 Exciting New Feature! An on/off switch.
18:47 Programming the Stratus boards, the SDK
21:10 Good documentation matters
22:30 What is Zephyr and why?
26:37 Join the Stratus community: Discord, GitHub
27:38 Why open source? Did it help?
28:58 Did open source build engagement?
31:10 A peek at the Conexio Blitz and its chipset
33:49 The Stratus Pro campaign is live!
35:19 How did community feedback on the original Stratus influence the Stratus Pro?
37:30 The startlingly low power consumption of the Stratus Pro
39:10 The software and hardware used to accomplish that low power
41:20 How did they select the platforms to integrate with?
43:19 About the DataCake IoT platform
44:36 Who is Conexio? A mystery revealed…
46:30 The Chicago hacker scene
47:22 What’s in the future for Conexio, upcoming projects
49:02 The pandemic origins of the Stratus!
50:13 Why Conexio Stratus is the best! (It’s the community…)
52:40 Checking out some hardware and some pro tips
54:33 Working with Hackster and Hackaday
57:00 The Cory Doctorow Approach: Publish Everywhere
57:45 Their approach to social media and communicating with the community

About our Guest

Rajeev Piyare is an entrepreneur, wireless systems engineer research scientist and photographer originally from the beautiful islands of Fiji and now living and working in Chicago, USA.

Conexio Stratus

1 x Conexio Stratus, a compact yet powerful smart edge platform with onboard environmental sensors, accelerometer, solar energy harvester, global IoT SIM with 500MB cellular data, and 250 SMS valid for 10 years.

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