Ways to send AT commands to Ublox!

Hello,

I have purchased the Dash board and was able to connected to Hologram Cloud. All good!
Now, the next step for me, is to be able to send AT commands to the uBlox modem. I saw that you have promised to release this functionality a year ago but it is no where to be found!
Can you please provide an update on this matter?
What are the other alternatives to talk to the modem directly?

Many thanks.

Hi, great to hear that’s working for you.

I think it’s been a while since we updated our plan for this.

Basically, we’ve found that it’s hard for our firmware to safely manage the modem in a stable manner while also allowing AT commands to come through from the user program. Therefore, we need to take an all-or-nothing approach where our standard firmware won’t have this passthrough functionality but you could install a passthrough system firmware that gives you full control over the modem (but you have to manage the connection yourself).

We have this passthrough firmware available and can post it here soon.

We are also still planning on wrapping around various functionality in the ublox modem like signal strength and that will be coming soon in a firmware update. Keep an eye on the thread here for updates: Dash Firmware and Arduino Integration Updates - #7 by Reuben

Excellent!
Looking forward to download the passthrough system firmware.
What kind of time line are we talking about here?

Cheers.

We’ll try to get it posted by end-of-day tomorrow.

Great news. Great support guys! Congratulations.

Now, when you said that we need to manage the connection ourselves, you mean through AT commands, right?

Right. With the passthrough firmware, the Dash basically turns into a dumb modem and so you would have to send the proper AT command sequence to establish a connection.

Here’s the system firmware image for passthrough mode.

You can follow the instructions at https://hologram.io/docs/guide/dash/programming-and-firmware#standalone-updater if you haven’t updated your system firmware manually before.

konekt_system_module_simple_modem.ino.bin.zip (7.2 KB)

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Thanks very much Reuben. I have downloaded and installed the passthrough firmware.
I was able to see some feedback from the modem: “+CGREG: 5 …”

I have couple questions to basically understand how this passthrough mode woks:
1- The system microcontroller talks to the Ublox via UART interface. I believe this is how it sends the AT commands to the modem. These command are received from the User Microcontroller through the UART interface (the one that Dash call as SerialCloud). Please correct me if I am wrong?
2- What Baud rate should I configure my SerialUSB interface in order to properly write on the Serial Cloud? Is it 115200?
3- Is there a special consideration in order to configure and establish the data link with the Hologram cloud? Like a PIN for the SIM or the carrier that I have to choose in order to use my data plan with Hologram Cloud.
4- Why the dash official firmware source code is no longer open? Can we have a copy of an older version? Can we have example on how you interface with the Ublox?

It is a lot of questions, but I think you see now where I am going. I will be very grateful if you can help me with this.

Cheers.

1- The system microcontroller talks to the Ublox via UART interface. I believe this is how it sends the AT commands to the modem. These command are received from the User Microcontroller through the UART interface (the one that Dash call as SerialCloud). Please correct me if I am wrong?
- Yes, you are correct.

2- What Baud rate should I configure my SerialUSB interface in order to properly write on the Serial Cloud? Is it 115200?
- Yes, it should be 115200

3- Is there a special consideration in order to configure and establish the data link with the Hologram cloud? Like a PIN for the SIM or the carrier that I have to choose in order to use my data plan with Hologram Cloud.
- No special consideration, aside from setting the APN to hologram

4- Why the dash official firmware source code is no longer open? Can we have a copy of an older version? Can we have example on how you interface with the Ublox?
- I don’t believe we have ever released our firmware yet. It’s always been a goal of ours, but we’ve run into a few setbacks. Rest assured, we are working on it, and expect to have it released in the next month or so. Until then, we likely won’t have any examples available.

Hi, I’m following this thread because I need to have a local SIM to work with DASH because the HOLOGRAM SIM does not cover my area/country.

I’ve done the following so far:

  1. Use MACOS firmware updater v0.7.3
  2. Selected USER PROGRAM as the type of firmware update
  3. Selected the konekt…ino.bin as the file
  4. The terminal says successful firmware update

However, going back to the ARDUINO IDE is not connecting to the DASH via USB port… eventhough I exited the terminal and firmware updater to free-up the USB port.

So I decided to upload the DASH BLINK sample to isolate the problem. The ARDUINO IDE prompted that the BOOTLOADER and FIRMWARE will be upgraded before the BLINK upload happens. Thus I suspect that that bootloader was affected by the .INO.DB firmware.

Let me know how to move forward from here.

I dig some more and found that there is an INO source file that can do a PASSTHROUGH for AT COMMANDS in the sample code for Hologram DASH. This INO file works on HOLOGRAM 0.9.2 but not yet in the 0.10.x version. (Fix is to come soon).

In case someone needs to change the APN setting of DASH, I posted the solution I got in this LINK.

If you’re using the PASSTHROUGH for AT COMMANDS, I suggest increasing the delay(1) at the end of the loop to match the minimum response time of the AT commands you’ll be executing.
In my case, I’m getting just the “OK” response from AT+UCELLINFO most of the time. I increased the delay to 1000 and get consistent expected output like +UCELLINFO: 0,2,515,2,7618,C8B0ED4,112,10688,12,21,“ID”