Actinius

Cellular IoT hardware designed, built and tested in Amsterdam

Actinius designs hardware and firmware for connected devices, and the work happens near Amsterdam, where its boards are designed, manufactured and tested. The company takes a client from an idea for a smart product through research and development to a first prototype and beyond. It says an idea can reach the market in as little as three months, working with a small group of partners and vendors to keep quality high.

Boards the company makes itself

The Icarus family is built around the nRF9160 chip and brings LTE-M, NB-IoT and GPS to a product. The range includes:

• Icarus IoT Board v2, a low-power device using GPS and cellular data.
• A version of the board in Zigbee format, and a coin-sized version.
• Environmental Sensor FeatherWing v2, with sensors for temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, VOC gases and light, plus an SD slot and a Grove connector.
• Icarus SoM Dev Kit v2, a development kit in Arduino form factor for the Icarus system on module.
• A low-power model using LoRa, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Pre-made boards and cloud software are offered to technical teams who want to cut research costs and the risk of a full development project.

Communication technologies

The company lists LTE-M, NB-IoT, UWB, LoRa, LoRaWAN, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi among the technologies it works with.

How a project runs

Every engagement starts with an enquiry. After an initial brief and scope of work, the team researches solutions and builds a first hardware prototype for early customers to try. A validated prototype can go through a small production run of twenty to fifty units on Actinius's own facilities. If the product holds up, a full-scale run follows, either at the client's own manufacturer or at one of Actinius's partners. After release, support options keep products up to date and in good condition.