First Thoughts on the mangOH Red
Announced last week, the new mangOH Red board from Sierra Wireless is an open source, and open hardware, development board intended to…
Announced last week, the new mangOH Red board from Sierra Wireless is an open source, and open hardware, development board intended to serve as a prototyping platform for the Internet of Things.
About the size of a credit card, the board’s most obvious feature the snap-in socket supporting CF3-compatible wireless modules. Next to it is a slot for an IoT Expansion Card—an ‘open hardware’ pluggable module standard for sensors and radio.
Built around an ARM Cortex-M4, the board has a 26-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible header block for general I/O, and comes with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE. It also has a micro SD Card slot, a SIM card slot, along with an on-board accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as temperature, pressure, and light sensors.
The USB serial connector allows you to directly login to the Legato Linux installation running on the board, which provides an application framework aimed at helping development of connected devices, and integration into Sierra’s AirVantage cloud platform.
These days when a new board is released it’ll generally come with a radio, or two, and often be marketed as “the best way develop your next Internet of Things product.” Unfortunately quite a few of these boards have both a large footprint, and high power requirements.
Which makes the mangOH somewhat refreshing, as it seems to be both small, and have low power requirements. The mangOH consumes as little as 5mA of current in deep sleep mode, while still being able to wait for a sensor interrupts from general I/O.
However perhaps the most interesting thing about the board, for those thinking about using it to turn a prototype into a product, is that the design is open hardware and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. You are free to modify and reproduce the mangOH design to build commercial products with no restrictions.
You can pick up a mangOH Red for $99, and there seems to be some decent documentation to get you started. But if the mangOH Red is a bit on the small side? Well there’s always Sierra’s other development board, the mangOH Green. Instead of the 26-pin Raspberry Pi connector, it comes with Arduino-compatible headers instead.