Wireless connectivity made easy with u-connect

Getting short range communications modules to behave exactly the way you want them to can be a battle – even for experienced programmers. Typically, it involves complex, time-consuming, and bug-prone embedded systems programming. If that’s what you are into, or if your end-device requires the full flexibility that comes with programming an application from scratch and going it solo, our open CPU wireless module variants cater to experts like you. 

But what if you don’t have a team of embedded systems programs at your disposal, and you need to minimize risks, complexity, and your device’s time to market? That’s where u-connect comes in, managing connectivity behind the scenes and letting you focus on your product’s main features.

From uCS to u-connectXpress

If you’ve worked with our short range modules before, you might already be familiar with one member of the u-connect family. As of today, u‑connectXpress is the new name of our well-established u‑blox connectivity software (uCS).

Developed over the past one and a half decades, u-connectXpress (formerly uCS) has grown into the industry’s most feature-rich configuration-based software to configure connectivity, offering easy access to all the building blocks you need to cook up a solution for basically any use case you have in mind using your short range modem.

u-connectXpress lets you configure your modem with zero code. Instead, it relies on a vast lexicon of industry standard AT commands, as well as many u‑blox specific ones, that solve the complex real-time and wireless parts of your application. Our s-center configuration software is a powerful and easy-to-use tool to configure and test your application via a user-friendly graphical interface.

Scripting to program connected sensors (and more)

Now, let’s say you’d like to wirelessly send measurements from a Bluetooth enabled temperature sensor to a wireless gateway – a task that typically requires programming. Using the latest variant of our NINA-B3 Bluetooth 5 module, you can speed up application development with the second member of the u-connect family: u‑connectScript.

u-connectScript lets anyone who has worked with JavaScript quickly learn to develop complex wireless applications and run them right on the module’s MCU or on a separate host.

Using the concept of u-connect streams, you can instruct a sensor connected to the NINA-B3’s I2C port to read data at a specific frequency and send the reading to the gateway in only 7 lines of code. All you need to program the module is a USB cable and access to a computer with visual studio code and the u-connectScript plugin (available in the document and resources section of this page) and you’re ready to go.

Figure: JavaScript code needed to develop a temperature sensor application

Go wireless securely with u-connect

Finally, u-connect won’t just speed up and simplify the development of your wireless application. It will also enhance its security. We all know that security is non-negotiable for connected devices. But not everyone has a security experts in their product development team. Applications developed using u-connect all leverage our u‑blox Secure Boot technology, which ensures that the software running on the module is authenticated.  If anyone tried to run a device that has been tampered with, it won’t boot.  

To learn more about u-connectXpress and u-connectScript, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our global sales and support network or visit the u-connect page.