With the booming growth of e-commerce, especially in fresh produce logistics, the demands extend beyond fleet management. Full environmental monitoring throughout the entire process is crucial to ensure that consumers receive their products as fresh as possible, with no food safety concerns. This need for monitoring isn’t limited to fresh food but also applies to pharmaceuticals and vaccines, which can degrade if exposed to improper temperatures. Therefore, monitoring during transport is essential to ensure the effectiveness of medicines and vaccines!

STMicroelectronics offers the STEVAL-ASTRA1B, which comes with a complete suite of software, firmware libraries, tools, batteries, and a plastic casing. Thanks to its modular and optimized design, it simplifies the development of innovative tracking and monitoring solutions.

The STEVAL-ASTRA1B is built around the STM32WB5MMG module and the STM32WL55JC SoC, supporting both short-range and long-range connections (BLE, LoRa, and proprietary protocols in the 2.4 GHz and sub-1 GHz bands). It also includes the ST25DV64K for NFC connectivity and features enhanced security with the STSAFE-A110.

The solution includes a complete set of environmental and motion sensors (LIS2DTW12, LSM6DSO32X, HTS221, STTS22H, LPS22HH). Additionally, the Teseo-LIV3F GNSS module provides outdoor positioning.

Power management is optimized for long battery life, built around the ST1PS02 and STBC03 components.

The FP-ATR-ATRA1 is an STM32Cube software package that provides a complete asset tracking application for the STEVAL-ATRA1B. It supports both long-range and short-range connections. The application reads data from environmental and motion sensors, retrieves geographical location from GNSS, and transmits this information to the cloud using Bluetooth® Low Energy and LoRaWAN connections.

The FP-ATR-ATRA1 package supports low-power profiles and related conversions to ensure long battery life. It also includes key features such as security element management, the ability to add custom algorithms, debugging interfaces, and expansion capabilities.

The firmware is provided as a standard source code .zip file.

It offers a complete asset tracking firmware application for managing both remote connections (LoRaWAN) and short-range connections (Bluetooth® Low Energy and NFC).

Features

• Management of environmental and motion sensors for monitoring asset status.
• Outdoor positioning and geolocation based on GNSS NMEA strings available on the Teseo-LIV3F.
• Personalization of security elements and certificate retrieval.
• Power/battery management with low-power operating modes.
• Flexible state machine supporting various use cases.
• Predefined customizable use cases: fleet management, livestock monitoring, and cargo tracking.
• Implementation support for the STEVAL-ATRA1B.
• Fully integrated into an end-to-end proof-of-concept ecosystem, including the DSH-ASSETRACKING network cloud dashboard.