The challenge
Telstra's Innovation Challenge sets university, enterprise and public teams one problem to solve with IoT—Australian agriculture in 2017, run with Landmark; health in 2018, co-sponsored by Bupa alongside Qualcomm, Ericsson and Muru-D. Entrants can only build as far as the hardware they are handed.
2017: the IoT Shield
We built the kit every 2017 entrant started with: an Arduino-form shield connecting Intel's Genuino 101 to the Telstra mobile network at CAT-1 rates, carrying data to Cumulocity and Microsoft Azure IoT. Its custom co-processor is more powerful than the host Genuino—the deliberate choice that let us move communications, security and socket management out of the entrant's own code. Telstra called it "a key enabler for the future of IoT connectivity". The winners—DiUS, Team CQU and Farmate—built a fertiliser tank, a fertigation controller and a hive monitor on it.
2018: the CAT-M1 kit
The Telstra CTO group came back for a second year. We designed, assembled and tested two boards in Melbourne, one each for the university and public streams, and delivered the software APIs with them. Both moved to a Quectel BG96 for CAT-M1 and NB-IoT, still pairing an Arduino host with a custom co-processor handling encryption, LWM2M services and payload transmission, and added GPS, temperature, ambient light and accelerometer sensing, a MikroBUS breakout and battery supply sub-systems. We had been evaluating CAT-M1 and NB-IoT modules from u-blox, Telit and Quectel in hardware since September 2017; Telstra published the kit's setup guide on GitHub.
