• 1
    Introduction

    Hey, what's up, Guys! Akarsh here from CETech.

    In your childhood, you must have played with Lego. Did they use to be fun? Of course, they were. Today we are going to bring that fun back again but now we are not going to play with traditional lego. We are going to play with electronic lego for that we have with us the RAK Helium Developer Kit based on the Wisblock Technology which is completely modular and is a very easy-to-use method for making Helium nodes and several different things using Helium. The most important thing about this kit is that all the baseboards and the devices are designed in such a manner that they do not require any kind of soldering to stay connected. It's a kind of snap and play mechanism just like lego where we have a baseboard and on that baseboard, there are dedicated slots to connect other different sensors, antennas, etc. This mechanism is a great thing as it totally removes the hard work that was required to solder devices to keep them connected and make project making fast and easy.

    We will be using this kit to make a Helium node and after that, we will test it by connecting it to a data-only hotspot from RAK. We will also make some more projects using this kit but they will be made in the next articles. For now, let's move to the fun part.

  • 2
    Get PCBs for Your Projects Manufactured
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    You must check out JLCPCB for ordering PCBs online for cheap!

    You get 10 good quality PCBs manufactured and shipped to your doorstep for 2$ and some shipping. You will also get a discount on shipping on your first order. To design your own PCB head over to easyEDA, once that is done upload your Gerber files onto JLCPCB to get them manufactured with good quality and quick turnaround time.

  • 3
    About Wisblock Technology
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    WisBlock is an amazing product built by the RAK company for the IoT industry. With its modular approach solutions are built like clicking blocks together to realize your ideas. Its modular approach makes it easy to implement low power wide area network (LPWAN) into your IoT solution. Using industry-grade connectors WisBlock is not only applicable for rapid prototyping, development of solutions, but the same hardware can be used in the final product and mass production. In a small size of just 30 x 60mm WisBlock combines an MCU, LoRa communication, up to 4 onboard sensors, and IO or communication extensions. WisBlock solutions can be coded with the easy-to-use entry-level Arduino IDE or PlatformIO extension for Atom or MSVC. The Arduino framework offers a wide range of libraries that are ready to use.

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    WisBlock solutions can be created for larger projects as well with professional IDE’s like the Segger Embedded Studio or Keil. WisBlock consists of WisBlock Base, WisBlock Core, WisBlock Wireless, WisBlock Sensor, WisBlock Interface, WisBlock Display, WisBlock Extra, WisBlock Storage and WisBlock Power. WisBlock is created with 4 modular blocks.

    • WisBlock Base is the baseboard that connects everything.
    • WisBlock Core is the computation and communication module.
    • WisBlock Sensor is a selection of sensor and input modules.
    • WisBlock IO extends the output and communication possibilities of the WisBlock Core.

    You can get more details about the Wisblock Technology and devices from here.