I design PoCs. As a freelancer, I don’t have a huge firm behind me . Nor do I handle “bulk” orders. If I can’t find something on Mouser/ Digikey (maybe Chinese suppliers as a last resort) I’m toast.
Currently, the only available Morse Micro IC in Europe (Mouser) is a Quectel module. Working with Quectel is a can of worms (security issues, transparency issues, getting help or SDKs off them elicits responses along the lines of “don’t care you bought our modules, for the SDK you need to buy 10k units”).
I bought a HaLow combo off Seeed and tested it last night. I’m 100% sure I have an entire section of products I can migrate over to HaLow . However, the IoT module from those guys uses a Quectel module not available for purchase - which does not work with the IOT SDK provided by MM. Probably because of the provided binaries (FGH100M-H, i think, not sure).
Searching for “MM6108-MF08651-US”, the module used by the official devkit, is a dead end.
On Mouser it shows up as both end of life and “we don’t ship in the EU”.
Every module I’ve been able to find is ported to ESP32 and that’s it - which is a cretinous MCU to use if you care about power consumption. Are any bare chips or MM modules available for purchase anywhere in low qty?
Because right now this seems like a very interesting, but a (sadly) pretty much dead end avenue.
We don’t sell bare chips directly to the public as there is significant effort require to tune and configure the RF front end which has to occur for a device to be compliant in the appropriate regions. Modules are definitely recommended over chips.
At this stage, our European support is limited due to tighter regulatory requirements. Your best option is the CE certified variant of the Quectel module - FGH100MAAMD.
Module vendor SDKs are largely based on our software (see Morse Micro · GitHub), with the board configuration files (BCFs) adjusted to suit the module. A large part of the effort behind the recent migration of our source code to GitHub, and this forum, is to support people such as yourself who otherwise have limited access to resources.
The primary resource you’ll be missing here is the BCF. You’ll have to push Quectel to at least provide you this for your module.
We’re happy to support you as best we can while we continue to grow out our open source channels, and our European support.
If you’re primarily building projects which are Linux based, the Linux porting guide is a good place to start. If you’re microcontroller based, then you will want to look at the mm-iot-sdk or one of the other mm-iot-xyz flavours. I have a personal preference for Zephyr for the portability.
