How to Help Developers to Build LoRa® Devices
How to quickly develop and manufacture your Lora Products using Seeeds manufacturing capabilities and Know how
There is increasing demand of IoT devices for specific scenarios. However, it’s known that “Hardware is hard”, and it’s prohibited for many people to create a hardware product, and it’s even harder to pinpoint and avoid the obstacles in the process from idea to production.
In order to quickly get your products up and running Seeed can assist you with a wide area of services. We have been supporting creators and developers for almost 12 years now and you can use our expertise for your projects. We have been working with developers from a wide area of industries ranging from simple telemetry to highly sophisticated edge and cloud computing and have experience in different vertical markets
During “The Things Conference” we hold a virtual speech in which we introduced the process of developing your own LR Products. Because we received a lot of interest we decided to make a blog post to show you the fastest way of creating your own LR device.
Let’s take a simple CO2 Sensor as an example. CO2 sensors are used to for environmental monitoring, agriculture or controlling the air quality in indoor spaces. These different scenarios all have different requirements for the sensor. In agriculture and environmental monitoring the sensor needs to deliver accurate data under harsh conditions with high/low temperatures or high humidity. Maybe you want to use the sensor to wireless transmit real time data of air quality in order to control the ventilation in an office.
With the Internet of things and cloud computing there will be many niche markets which will need specialized sensors and devices. Seeed offers an efficient pathway for inventors who design products that cater to a specific demand or niche sector.
The way to develop and sell your own LR devices includes 4 steps
- Prototype
- Design and Manufacturing
- Global Distribution
Prototype
The first step to build your prototype is choosing a LR Module and a development kit. To develop a prove-of-concept there are many different kits depending on your intended application. One of our most popular Systems is Grove which can be used for environmental monitoring.
After you have your basic kit you can add more functions by adding new modules and sensors. Each part is designed with a modular mindset so it is just plug-and-play. This modular design makes it easy to build simple prototypes and prove-of-concept. Seeed is also a proponent of open hardware. We have an open community in which everybody can discuss their ideas and find solutions. The website has its own wiki in which you can find step-by-step instructions for all our products.
Golden-Sample
When you have your prove-of-concept it is time to turn the prototype in a golden sample that will be used as a blueprint for the mass production of your product. Seeed will assist you with the Design and Customization of your product to ideally fit the requirements. Our engineers and designers can help you with:
- Hardware Design
- Rich library of hardware design
- Embedded Software Design
- Linux Kernel Customization
- Firmware/ driver
- Mechanical/Enclosure Design
- Mold design
- Plastic/Aluminum/Rubber/Silicon
- Packaging Design
- Graphic Design
- Package design
- Reliability test
- Certification
- CE,FCC,MIC
- RoHS, REACH, CA65
Our experience with more than 1000 IoT products has streamlined our development process. When you design a new product with us we do not have to start from scratch and instead can rely on experience and plans from products we build before. So nowadays the time between a proposal and the first sample is less than 45 days for simple products.
After producing the golden sample you can start manufacturing small batches (1-100 pieces) to test them out or use as marketing material. Our Fusion PCB assembly service gives you an instant online quotation and the PCBA time is only seven working days for all OPL orders.
We also offer free DFA and DFM reviews and you can test out the market by selling your products on our Fusion Marketplace.
Global Distribution
When you ready to scale up Seeed will manufacture your product and you can use our worldwide distribution network to reach up to 1 million potential customers through more than 200 regional distributors.
Here are some of the previous products we helped to create:
So start working on your own project and take advantage of our promotion that offers you 5 Wio E5 models for free when prototyping with Seeed Fusion PCBA service.
Note: The LoRa® Mark is a trademark of Semtech Corporation or its subsidiaries.
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