(Not) Getting started with the Nordic Thingy:91

Thanks to element14 and Nordic Semiconductor, I won a Nordic Thingy:91 for asking one of the best five questions in a recent element14 webinar - Nordic Thingy:91, Cellular IoT Prototyping Platform (Winners Announced: Win a Nordic Thingy:91 for Asking Questions!) .

While I waited for it to arrive in the post from Norway, I watched the helpful "Getting started" video. That made it look easy.

Here is how I got on with setting it up. Spoiler alert - it was far from easy!

• I set up an account on nRF Connect for Cloud
• I went to "add device" and added the iBasis SIM card details to my nRF Connect account by "scratching off" to reveal the PUK details from the SIM card holder. All good so far.
• I put the SIM card into the Nordic Thingy:91. Note that the electrical contacts on the SIM should be face-down, with the cut out corner facing towards the top of the device, using the writing and Nordic logo to orient the device.
• I then tried to associate the Thingy:91 device details (serial number and PIN number) with my nRF Connect account but this failed. After investigation, it turned out that the included LTE-M SIM card is not supported in (my part of) the UK.
• Fail!

To be fair to Nordic Semiconductor, all of my difficulties stemmed from the fact that the Nordic Thingy:91 is supplied configured for LTE-M networks (with an iBasis eSIM card included) but we don't have LTE-M in the UK. The network coverage map provided by iBasis says "Limited connectivity" for UK, but does not elaborate. Not to worry, I thought. The Thingy:91 also supports NB-IoT. I'll use that.....

... If only it were that simple. Here is the story of my (ongoing) quest to get my Thingy:91 working in the UK.

NB-IoT is allegedly available in my part of the UK from Vodafone. Finding out how to get a NB-IoT SIM from Vodafone was a painful experience. They sell a "V-Sim" which is included in various Vodafone-branded IoT devices and supposedly supported in several 3rd-party IoT devices (but not the Thingy:91). I bought one anyway (£5 on the Vodafone website) and downloaded the associated "V by Vodafone" app. You have to use the app to enable the SIM (and choose a price plan). At the moment at least, Vodafone assumes that you have a Vodafone device if you buy a V-Sim, so activating the device is an act of guesswork. Anyway, I chose a £2 per month price plan just to see if it worked. The activation appeared to work so I put the SIM into the Thingy:91 and turned it on. Of course, it didn't work. Then began the long process of investigation and research on the Nordic Devzone. Has anybody else had this problem? What SIM card did they use and where did they get it? After reading through a lot of posts, it seemed that it was possible to get Vodafone NB-IoT working with a Thingy:91 in the UK, but not with the V-Sim I had bought. I had to ring Vodafone's Business Sales and ask for a developer's SIM.

You'd think that finding a phone number for people working at a mobile phone company wouldn't be hard but Vodafone only publish a handful of phone numbers and they have "gatekeepers" who answer the phone and tell you that the person you need will phone you back. Did they? Of course they didn't. Not for a week anyway (and only because I rang up several times to chase them).

Eventually I got to speak to a person in the NB-IoT business section of Vodafone.

(me) "Please can I have a developer's SIM and 50Mb to 100Mb of data so I can develop a prototype?"

(Vodafone) "Possibly, but you'd have to pay £200 to £300 per month" (for the privilege of being on their developers platform, whatever that is). "Are you happy to pay this?".

(Me) "Nope."

To be continued ....

[Updated 14 March 2020]

Spoiler alert ...... I have the Thingy:91 working on London, UK but ...... it doesn't cost £200 per month but it's still not a cheap solution. Now read on...

Since January, I continued my quest to find a SIM that would make my Thingy:91 work in London, UK. There were rumours that O2 had started to rollout an LTE-M1 service in the UK to complement (or perhaps compete with) Vodafone's NB-IoT service. The attraction of this would be (I am told, but will wait and see if it's true) that the iBasis SIM provided with the Thingy:91 would work automatically on the firmware that is on the Thingy:91 when you get it. In February, O2 issued a press release saying that they had already rolled out 50 sites in the UK and more would follow. I tried to find out from O2 where those sites are and when London would get full coverage but my experience of dealing with O2 was no better than the Vodafone experience - if you ring the number provided, they don't know what you are talking about and nobody seems prepared to give any specifics.

One of the Nordic sales team for the UK did contact me and said that she thought there was NB-IoT coverage in the whole of Cambridge, Paddington station and Newbury (Berkshire). She also put me on to a company called Arkessa, who have links with the main mobile phone operators and repackage their services to consumers. After a brief dialogue with their International Sales Director, it appeared that they could provide the same NB-IoT Vodafone SIMs that I wasn't able to purchase myself, but provisioned for their own retail platfom. The drawback was that they are pricey - £50 plus £10 for provisioning and delivery for a three-month pack of 5 SIM cards giving a 25MB per SIM, per month. Since I have been on this quest for so long, I agreed to the price and awaited my SIMs. First I had to sign a lengthy contract. When I say "I", Arkessa expect to deal with corporate bodies but, as a self-employed person I do have a trading company that I can use, so was able to proceed and signed the deal. And waited .... The contract says there is a 5 day delivery period, but (even if that means 5 business days), it was actually 6. Never mind, they arrived and I plopped one into the Thingy:91, having first replaced the LTE-M1 firmware with NB-IoT firmware (using the Segger J-Link connection on the Thingy:91) and Nordic nRF Connect for desktop. Did it spring into life and start streaming sensor data to nRF Cloud? If you have followed this saga so far, you'll know the answer to that one... No.

I checked and rechecked that I had loaded the right firmware to the Thingy:91, making sure I also had the latest version of the modem firmware. I used the LTE Connect software to communicate directly with the Thingy:91's cellular modem using AT Commands. I could see that there was a Vodafone signal available, but nothing I tried seemed to work. It is always hard when you are using a device and software that you have never used before to know what to expect, but it just didn't seem right. So I arranged a debug session with the Arkessa helpdesk. We spent another hour getting nowhere and they concluded that, actually, my signal wasn't good enough. That wasn't what I wanted to hear, having just spent £60 on what would be a pack of useless SIMs.  So, I found out where the nearest Vodafone cellular tower is and went out in the car with my Thingy:91 and laptop, so see if I could get a better signal. Nope!

Later that evening, the Arkessa helpdesk guy emailed me to confess that, having checked, they had not provisioned my SIM cards properly (but had now fixed it). So, I tried again, and this time everything burst into life and I was streaming data immediately. Here is the proof.

Fair play to the Arkessa guy for following it up and checking (it was around 7:00pm on a Friday evening by then), but somewhat annoying that I had wasted several (more) hours.

Everything is not perfect, however, as the dashboard on nRF Cloud does not seem to be rendering the data in graphical form, which is what I was expecting. The data is coming though in JSON format as you can see in the right-hand panel, so that's a good start. The suggestion to upgrade my firmware must be bogus advice. I have logged a ticket on the Nordic Devzone, and await a response.

So, I can report that I have a Thingy:91 working in London at last. Given that Vodafone have pretty good national coverage in the UK, I expect it will work in other places too, so I'll take it on a road trip someday soon. In the brief time I have had it, I noticed that the demo application burns through the data allowance pretty fast, which isn't a particular concern as I have to use it up within three months anyway. If and when the iBasis SIM starts working with the O2 LTE-M1 service, I will edit the code to make sure that my "sending frequency" is a lot lower than every second. In the meantime, I will make the most of my three-month trial.

[Updated 29 April 2020]

Well, I may have spoken too soon. I thought that getting the data to display on nRF Cloud in graphical form would just be a case of making a few adjustments here and there. Initially Nordic suggested that my device certificates might not have uploaded properly. So, I went through the process of uploading them again, but still no graphical data. Over the past few weeks, I have tried so many variations of modem firmware, UART bridge firmware, device firmware. Meanwhile the nRFConnect software has gone through various upgrades, some of which broke other things. To cut a very long and frustrating story short, I finally managed (with the unstinting help of Nordic Support) to get EVERYTHING working properly at the same time. Here is the beautiful result.

I suspect that makes me one of the few people in the UK, outside a development lab, to get a Nordic Thingy:91 working properly. Next step is to wait for the O2 LTE-M1 service to arrive in my area so I can use the iBasis SIM provided with the device, rather than the somewhat expensive Vodafone solution I am currently enjoying.