MTC.2-N9151 A New Era
Yesterday, LooUQ announced our new smart modem based on the Nordic nRF9151 module. This is the beginning of something new for LooUQ… our first non-Quectel device (LooUQ and Quectel are still friends LOL) and our first smart device with integrated MCU facilities. The nRF9151 has an Arm Cortex-M33 as a dedicated application processor, fully programmable for the user, with 1MB of FLASH, 256kB of RAM, and a broad array of peripherals. With the MTC2-N9151 you do not need a separate MCU chip in your design.
Top and bottom of our pre-production MTC.2-N9151 modem.
The MTC.2-N9151 (N9151) is a small form-factor at only 30mm x 40mm. The connectivity between the N9151 and the rest of your system is via a M.2 type connector supporting both power and ample expandability. Most of the nRF9151’s 32 expansion ports are exposed to the edge connector. These can be used as simple I/O or assigned to one of the nRF9151’s four serial peripherals (UART, I2C, SPI in any combination). Also on the edge connector are the two required power inputs 5v and your host power reference (2.8v or 3.3v).
There are separate antenna connectors for LTE communications and GNSS positioning. Shown above is our pre-production model. The shown board revision supports passive GNSS antennas with the integrated LNA. Production, which is already at manufacturing, will add a second GNSS connector for external active GNSS antennas. LNA power is controlled with software for both of the GNSS antenna options, saving power when no GNSS location gathering is active.
The SIM slot supports standard Nano-SIM 4FF format cards. LooUQ has to date, tested with Hologram and Onomondo SIM cards.
Programming for the N9151 is accomplished in Nordic Connect SDK (aka NCS). Nordic Connect is an extension to VSCode, offering a rich development experience. NCS is based on Zephyr RTOS and has tooling to assist creation of KConfigs (configuration) and Device Tree (peripheral mapping). LooUQ has provided board definitions to get you started immediately. Get started the easy way by copying a Nordic sample and then select the N9151 as your target when creating a build configuration.
New to Nordic NCS? Consider spending time with the Nordic DevAcademy NCS Fundamentals and Intermediate courses. Nordic guides you through the process of building robust RTOS applications.
When you are ready to get started, you can pop your N9151 into one of LooUQ’s MTC.2 Breakout boards to make prototyping easy as well. It exposes the GPIO and control pins to breadboard compatible headers, reset circuit, and a SWD 5x2 header for flash/debug.
MTC.2 Breakout, with support for all LooUQ MTC.2 modems, including the N9151.
The N9151 is the soul of the forthcoming LooUQ LQnode (source-available remote sensor platform) and LQconnect (DECT-NR+ to Ethernet gateway). Look for these new products from LooUQ in June/July 2025.
A limited number of these are available now as an engineering samples, please reach out to answers@loouq.com for details. The engineering samples support passive GNSS antennas, or active GNSS antennas with an external LNA power source. Beyond the GNSS antenna differences, there are no changes between the pre-production and production versions. All software and configurations are exactly the same.