Digi XBee Cellular is a small, cost- effective, and fully certified embedded modem that makes integrating cellular connectivity easy.
I'm Rob Faludi, Chief Innovator for Digi International, and today we're going to be unboxing the XBee Cellular LTE Cat One Development Kit, which contains everything you need to get started with embedded cellular communication.
Let's open the box and take a look. Here's the Digi XBee Cellular Modem itself. You can see it's in the official XBee form factor and footprint and includes two U.FL antenna connectors. These are the two U.FL antennas, a primary one that both sends and receives, and an optional secondary one to further improve receive performance. The best part of the kit is here.
Each XBee Cellular Development Kit comes with an M2M data plan sim card that is absolutely free for the first six months. So you can get started with XBee Cellular right away. You also get an XBee Development Board, a power adapter, and of course a USB cable.
The whole thing comes in this nifty plastic enclosure, great for developers on the go. All of the kit documentation is online. You can see the link here.
The online instructions take you through assembling all of the hardware and setting up the modem using Digi's XCTU XP configuration and test utility. After adding your modem to XCTU and updating to the latest firmware, you can configure Digi XBee Cellular to try out various examples included in the kit.
These include sending an SMS message to and from any mobile phone, using TCP/IP internet connections to interact with ELIZA, a simple conversational robot, or an echo server that simply repeats whatever you type at it, or a daytime server that provides the current time in GMT. The kit also shows you how to connect to any TCP or UDP server in the cloud and demonstrates the process for making HTTP request, a common method of interacting with online applications.
Finally, you'll set up an account on Digi Remote Manager, allowing you to update firmware, and down the road, change configurations remotely, even after your XBee Cellular has been deployed in the field. Ready to get your own kit? Go to digi.com/xbeecellular and click on the "How to Buy" link.
Digi has a list of approved vendors. Simplicity is the next big thing in embedded cellular design and Digi XBee Cellular is the best way to get started.
Thanks for watching.