On my desk I had the opportunity to test a “Cinterion mPLS8” LTE module on sixfab’s “Base HAT” instead of the usual “Quectel EC-25”. Result:
- As a precaution I removed the jumper SJ4 on the “Base HAT” PCB: In contrast to Quectel the “Cinterion mPLS8” would support a CLK output for a second SIM card on this connection
- The “Cinterion mPLS8” is recognised instantly when connected to USB with generic drivers: one cdc_ether resembling the data stream interface and five cdc_acm for control (not all of them are usable, see below)
- The AT-command control of “Cinterion mPLS8” is available on ttyACM1 (e.g.
minicom -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyACM1
) - In my case the “ModemManager GUI” was nicely able to control the device, i.e. after entering there the correct APN the
wwan0
interface was up and connected to Internet
Some more remarks:
- Due to the enumeration as standardised cdc_ether, the connection setup and DHCP address lease were working out of the box
- If someone doesn’t want to use ModemManager, then the AT-command
at^swwan=1,1
will bring up the Internet connection onwwan0
- The AT-command interface on
ttyACM1
offers as well the option to gracefully power off the “Cinterion mPLS8” by sendingat^smso
. After shutdown, the device can be started again by toggling GPIO 26 due to the PWR_DSBLE functionality of the “Base HAT” (e.g. usinggpio -g write 26
and setting ouput first to1
and then to0
again) - Some of the
ttyACM
are not usable, e.g. in contrast to Quectel EC25 (based on Qualcomm 9207), the Cinterion device (based on Qualcomm 9215) doesn’t seem to offer a Qualcomm Diagnostics interface (see e.g. MobileInsight on Qualcomm Diagnostics) - The SIM-card holder on the bottom side of the “mPLS8” should remain empty … it would anyway be obscured by Raspberry’s GPIO header
More information on such mPLS8 can be obtained e.g. at Czech distributor “Sectron”:
Maybe I can add more after having perfomed additional tests (e.g. on GNSS)…
Best regards,
Thomas