Firefly RK3399 / AIO 3399J as a Gateway Platform

Gateways
1

Hello

I have been looking into a hardware platform for IoT Gateways, not dedicated entirely to LoRa connectivity, but that allows for expansion and other interfaces for connectivity, LoRa being one. Have a RAK831 Pi and love the concept of using Resin.io for management, but the Pi has limited expansion OOTB.

I have been looking for a platform that provides expansion for both 4G/LTE and LoRa as a start. I stumbled on the RK3399 platforms from Firefly but I’m looking to the community of hardware experts here to help me identify if its possible to have a 2x PCIe interfaces, one for LoRa and the other for LTE. It seems the “primary” use case is LTE on the PCIe Mini slot and SSD on the M.2 NGFF slot. The board appears to be designed to use the PCIe Mini exclusively for 4G/LTE. Not sure if this is the case, but in order to interface with the SIM I’m not sure that you can use an LTE card with the M.2 NGFF slot. Thats one question.

My second question is if any of the current PCIe LoRa concentrators (RAK, n-fuse) could work with this board using the M.2 NGFF slot where you would normally put the SSD. I am trying to avoid using USB for either LTE or LoRa as I would like to keep it in an enclosure.

Anyway, looking for some help on this. Open to other hardware platforms, but this one caught my eye.

Thanks!

Alan

Edit: Here is a link to the Firefly page. http://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/aio_3399.html & http://en.t-firefly.com/product/rk3399.html

2

At least for the RAK831 SPI version it is unlikely to work. That uses non standard (as there are no standard ones) lines for SPI. And USB based cards should be based on the picocell gateway design to have future proof software support for it which the RAK831 isn’t.
For RAK831 a dedicated interface card is required afaik.