Heltec Cube Cell

I quite like Heltec devices. They have a rough and ready quality to their construction, but their designs are well thought out and once you get your head around how they work you can use them as the basis for some neat devices. Four Heltec LoRa devices are presently powering our Air Quality sensors in Hull.

Heltec have just released a new device, the Cube Cell. It has LoRa built in and it has a stupidly low power consumption when in standby. It also has the electronics that allow the direct attachment of a solar panel.

It’s a more constrained platform than the devices based on the ESP32. There is no WiFi or Bluetooth, In fact the processor is built into the LoRa chip. You can find out more here.

In terms of what we want to do with our environmental sensors it looks very interesting. We should be able to port most of the code that we’ve written over to the platform as it is programmed in C++ using the Arduiono IDE. I’ve ordered one, it will be interesting to see what it is like when it arrives.