Cellular Capes for beaglebone and RaspiberryPi

It was mentioned by a member that an electronics project with Cellular modules might be good for a makerspace class.

These are the googled searches.
Skywire® BeagleBone Black Cape
https://nimbelink.com/skywire-beaglebone-black-modem/
digikey optional cellular beaglebone capes
https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/aeris/connected-cellular-beaglebone-iot-development-kit

Raspberry Pi Skywire Adapter

Kali Linux comes with many tool that might debug. I am looking for another operating system or tool set with less historical infamy in the tech community.

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Did anyone want this info?

yeah looks interesting. Might have been more a VCC kind if thing than electronics but it’s good here too…

So, what could one do with it?

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I would think backup communication channel for a wifi based device - perhaps an alarms system - would be one use.

Another might simply be communication in areas where wifi doesn’t exists. Maybe I could use this to remotely control a telescope mount located on a piece of property in the middle of nowhere…

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There was a person from science came into electronics was looking for a cellular product for raspberry pi or beaglebone. I knew the board existed. I think the guy that came in was @brianbterry. Personally i don’t know how to connect a beagle bone to a cellular tower and i am just trying to post relevant material. maybe kali might provide more connectivity… may be fedora…

Best to remember, Kali is just debian with infosec tools and fedora is just the freemium version of RHCE/CentOS. Both are very bloated and highly opinionated in their own ways but the take way is its all just linux and its all just using the same opensource projects to provide the “connectivity”.

Basically at the end of the day when connecting to cell towers one has a dial up modem that accepts at commands (extended for GSM) and in unix appears typically as /dev/ttyACM[0-9], /dev/ttyS[0-9], or /dev/ttyUSB[0-9] depending on udev settings and modem interfacing (ie usb, rs232, or other serial). At this point any typical dialier/terminal that supports ppp works. (never criticize “vintage tech” for being too old when we use it daily under the hood of all our mobile devices, major infrastructure, and IoT/EE)

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I would think as a last mile wifi grid or some sort of long haul back bone would be a good use case. Maybe even scaled down to esp8266-01 or smaller package size and killing the wifi all together on some embedded project.

Yep they are mostly bloat so I take the sd card and maybe use a 16GB or 32 GB and resize the partion using grub. That being said that bloat come standard so there are no problems of permission as installing wireless shark on mint was annoying. I was sort of taught to use wireless shark to see the internet frames.

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use wireless shark

did you meant wireshark?!

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Sadly my cellphone spell check and my inability to text using a cell phone does this. Yes wireshark.

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