The goal of this guide is to provide everything you need to set up, configure, and start collecting data from your Sparrow Development Kit. Let’s start with a quick overview of what Sparrow is, then look at what’s in your Sparrow Development Kit box, and finally get everything up and running.
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What is Sparrow?
Sparrow is a technology that enables one or more Nodes to communicate with a paired Gateway using a LoRa radio. That gateway, in turn, can then communicate with the cloud over Wi-Fi or cellular.
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Your Sparrow Developer Kit contains the items shown below. Let’s quickly define what each of these items are before discussing how to hook everything up.
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1. Notecarrier-AL A with a pre-installed Wi-Fi Notecard
The Wi-Fi Notecard is a System-on-Module that makes it easy to send data over a Wi-Fi network. The Notecarrier-ALA is a companion board that houses the Notecard.
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A Qwiic JST connector you’ll use to attach the Essentials Board to the Notecarrier-ALA.
5. STLINK-V3MINI
A stand-alone debugging probe for STM32 microcontrollers. You can use this to debug and update firmware on both the Essentials Board and Reference Nodes.
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2) Connect your Essentials Board to your Notecarrier-AL A using the included Qwiic cable.
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3) Ensure the DIP switch on the Notecarrier-AL A is set to 3V3, as 3V3 is a requirement when using a Wi-Fi Notecard.
TIP: The end of a safety pin works well for flipping DIP switches.
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4) Use the included Micro USB to USB-A data cable to connect the Notecarrier-AL A to your computer. After a few seconds you should see green LED lights on both the Notecarrier-AL A and Essentials Board.
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5) [OPTIONAL] Connect a LiPo battery to the JST connector labeled
LIPOon the Notecarrier-AL. The LiPo battery can power the gateway if you want to run everything without a USB connection after you complete this setup. The LiPo battery will charge when the Notecarrier-AL is connected to power through USBA. Because the gateway requires continuous power, the lipo battery can act as an uninterruptible power supply—ensuring your gateway continues to operate if your regular power source fails, or if you need to plug your gateway in at a different location.
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Set up Notehub
Notehub is a cloud service that receives data from the Notecard, and can route that data to your own cloud apps and services. You’ll need to set up a Notehub account and project to receive sensor data from your reference nodes.
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NOTE: Not seeing your Notecard? Make sure you’ve connected your Notecarrier-AL A to your laptop with a micro-USB-to-USB-A cable.
7) Issue the following command to connect associate your Notecard with your newly created Notehub project, making sure to substitute
<productUID>with your own value.Code Block {"req":"hub.set","product":"<productUID>","mode":"continuous"}
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8) Finally, issue the following command to connect your Wi-Fi Notecard to your home Wi-Fi network, making sure to substitute
<ssid name>and<password>with your own values.Code Block {"req":"card.wifi","ssid":"<ssid name>","password":"<password>"}
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3) On the Events page locate the textbox to the right of the “All Devices” dropdown. Type “sensors.db” in this textbox as a filter (see image below). If all went well, you should see one
sensors.dbevent for each Reference Node you paired.
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Over time , you’ll see two additional types of events in Notehub that .
air.qoevents report the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure from the node's onboard BME280 environmental sensor. The nodes take hourly environmental readings by default.motion.qoevents report motion detected from the node's onboard PIR motion sensor. The node reports motion as soon as the sensor detects it, however, the node will only send onemotion.qoevent every 15 minutes to save on battery. The event’scountreports the number of times the sensor detected motion since the previousmotion.qo, and
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the event's
totalreports the number of times the sensor detected motion since the device was last reset.
And with that, you have now completed the setup of your Sparrow Development Kit! For next steps we recommend that you:Let’s look at one more tip before you re-attach the backs of your Reference Node enclosures.
Distinguishing Between Multiple Reference Nodes
Each reference node in your Sparrow Development Kit has a unique identifier. You can view this identifier in the Filefield of each of the node’s air.qo and motion.qo events. For example, the screenshot below shows how to find a node’s identifier on a motion.qo event. (You can double click the event to view the full identifier, and to copy the value to your clipboard.)
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Having the identifier can be useful whenever you need to differentiate between multiple nodes, aka whenever you need to tell which node is which.
As another option, you can also determine a node’s identifier by pressing and releasing the node’s PAIR button. Doing so creates and syncs a _health.qo event that contains the pressed node’s identifier in its body.
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If you’d like, make note of any of your nodes’ identifiers using the steps above, and when you’re ready, go ahead and re-attach the backs of your Reference Node enclosures.
Next Steps
Now that you have everything connected and communicating, this is what we recommend as next steps.
1) Move your hardware to different locations. Since you have everything connected and communicating, now is a great time to Go ahead and reposition your Essentials Board and Reference Nodes to get readings from different locations. (And if you haven’t already, feel free to re-attach the backs of your Reference Node enclosures.)
NOTE: There are no hard-and-fast rules that dictate how far apart you can place LoRa devices because the optimal distance depends on whether your devices have a clear line-of-sight, or the signal needs to penetrate walls, concrete, and the like. In a home or building, devices will need to be placed closer together, ideally less than a hundred meters apart. Out in the open, devices can reach one another across 1 KM or more. As with anything, we strongly suggest you test your application under real-world circumstances prior to deployment.
2) Read more about what you can do with Sparrow. This quickstart helped you get your Sparrow Development Kit up and running, but there’s a lot more you can do with Sparrow. As a next step, we recommend checking out our Sparrow Setup and Run Guide, which provides a more detailed look at everything you can do with your Sparrow hardware.
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