Monkey Store's OpenThread Sensor Tag Offers Three Years' Environmental Monitoring From a Coin Cell
"We try to make OpenThread more available to the community because we think it is a great step into connecting devices and smart homes."
Berlin-based Monkey Store has begun selling an open source, ultra-compact, low-power environmental sensor designed for use with OpenThread networks — claiming to offer a three-year run time on a single coin cell battery.
"We try to make OpenThread more available to the community because we think it is a great step into connecting devices and smart homes," Monkey Store explains. "The Thread Sensor Tag is a low power sensor to measure pressure, temperature, humidity and light in a very small form factor running on a coin cell battery for ~3 years."
That long run-time comes from extremely low-power hardware: The coin-shaped sensor draws a claimed 125µA in its wake-up cycle including radio connection, 54µA when polling its on-board temperature, pressure, humidity, and light sensors, and just 3.19µA in deep sleep mode.
Built around the Nordic nRF52840 microcontroller, the sensor is designed to connect to an OpenThread network — "which isn't yet available everywhere," Monkey Store admits, :but will be in the future. Apple and Google already preparing their devices to be ready to connect."
One unusual wrinkle in the design, though, is that it doesn't use MQTT itself: Instead, data messages are passed as UDP packets. "Matter and MQTT would just create an overhead," the company explains. "But we have a Python script which you can run on the Border Router to receive the UDP Packets and translate them into a MQTT message."
The sensor tags are now available through the Monkey Store on Tindie, priced at $49.95; the design files have been released under the permissive MIT License on GitHub.