The B-L462E-CELL1 Discovery kit from STMicroelectronics lets you add cellular connectivity to your IoT device before committing to designing in the modem.

When adding cellular connectivity to an IoT device, you’d like first to demonstrate the ability to connect to a cellular network and transmit data. With the B-L462E-CELL1 Discovery Kit from STMicroelectronics, you can do just that. The kit contains everything you need to connect to a network over LTE Cat M/NBIoT.

The kit consists of two boards. The main board contains a module consisting of a cellular modem, eSIM, and 1 MB of Quad-SPI flash memory. The board adds another 64 MB of Quad-SPI flash memory, an STM32L4 Series STM32L462REY6TR microcontroller, user-defined LEDs, pushbuttons, a display, antenna, ultra-low-power 3D accelerometer, 3D magnetometer (LSM303AGR) from STMicroelectronics, capacitive digital sensor for relative humidity and temperature, and hPa absolute digital output barometer. It’s ST4SIM-200M GSMA-certified embedded SIM includes a prepaid cellular connectivity data plan. The board adds a SIM card socket and it connects to a host device though USB Micro-B connectors for power, USARTs, USB device, and ST-LINK/V2-1. You can power the board through USB or with batteries.

The additional fan-out board supports add-on boards that communicate through mikroBUS, ESP‑01, Grove I2C, Grove UART, and your own breadboards. For software development the kit includes an ST-LINK debugger/programmer and STM32Cube software libraries and software examples that demonstrate end-to-end connectivity.

The kit sells for $74 (US) in single quantities.