Our Sentrius™ MG100 Gateway: Now with Canvas Software Suite!

New to Canvas: Our MG100 LTE-M/NB-IoT Gateway

Our IoT devices are designed with a mission in mind: To help you connect your data to any cloud platform as easily and reliably as possible. Our MG100 collects sensor data via Bluetooth 5 and makes it available using common protocols like MQTT and HTTP for sending it to the cloud platform of your choice. This approach provides the easiest path forward to gathering sensor intelligence in the cloud.

That path just got easier with the MG100 gaining software support for our Canvas Software Suite. The Canvas Software Suite enables rapid embedded development across our MCU-based wireless products. Cross-chipset middleware, easy-to-use wireless APIs, on-module Python scripting and intuitive desktop/mobile tools are all available to dramatically ease embedded development.

The Canvas Software Suite gives developers a simpler, more powerful, MicroPython-enabled platform to develop applications for our MCU-based hardware and deploy those applications across all our devices supported by Canvas. It provides an easy way to develop once in familiar Python and deploy to any of our Canvas-enabled hardware.

In addition to the Canvas firmware, we provide Python sample applications giving OEMs a major head start in developing device-to-cloud solutions. Coupled with our Canvas tools, designing custom applications takes days instead of months. Our desktop and mobile tools allow you to develop Python scripts that run directly on the hardware with configuration and firmware updates available via BLE.

Sample Application #1 – BLE-to-MQTT Gateway Application

Our first sample application, available now for the MG100, Pinnacle 100, and BL5340 DVK, is designed to make gateway applications a breeze and to rapidly get Bluetooth sensor data to the cloud. It’s available in our canvas sample applications repository on GitHub, providing a working out-of-the-box demonstration of how easy it can be to prototype your next IoT design.

Our BLE-to-MQTT application is designed to demonstrate how the MG100 (and similar gateway capable DVKs) can simply relay BLE advertisement data from a Sentrius BT510 sensor to an MQTT broker. It also offers optional connectivity to a LwM2M server for device management.

Canvas firmware must first be programmed to the MG100 using SWD and a compatible debug probe. After this, all Python script development and firmware updates can be done using the gateway’s standard USB interface. Once connected, simply launch VS Code and load the Python sample application to the MG100 to start gathering sensor data. The sample application is designed to automatically find a nearby BT510 sensor which is advertising temperature data. The sample application extracts that temperature data, periodically packages it and publishes it to the configured MQTT broker. 

This is just the start of what you can do with Canvas. Our sample applications provide a demonstration of the power and simplicity of our MicroPython-based application engine, and full API documentation is available to show you exactly what you can do with our powerful software suite. Write once and deploy everywhere, with familiar and trusted tools like VS Code and MicroPython.

Available Now: Firmware and Software for Canvas on the MG100

Let Canvas and our MG100 gateway fast track your IoT development. The MG100 is just the latest in our list of Canvas-enabled hardware offerings. We’re adding new products to that portfolio all the time. Porting applications and code across hardware offerings is simple with Canvas Software Suite.

Firmware and sample applications are available on the MG100 product page in the Documentation section. Full information on the Canvas Software Suite, including API documentation, canvas overview, python user guide, and MG100 sample application is available on the Canvas Software Suite webpage. 

We’ll continue to roll out Canvas support to products in our portfolio where we can enable significant value to our customers, providing sample applications and tools to help bring products to market faster and more flexibly than ever.

To learn more about the Canvas Software Suite, visit: 

www.lairdconnect.com/canvas