New Year, New Features!
Written by: Soracom Team
Published: January 1, 2021
Let’s get 2021 started right!
Every year, we collect requests from users around the world to see how we can improve the Soracom experience to make connecting and managing your fleet of connected devices even easier.This year we received over 100 new feature requests, and in December, our engineering team got down to work delivering the ones that would make the most difference for you. As of today, here’s what you get!.
Request 1: Can I get a region-specific SIM card?
Global connectivity is great, but not every project needs that level of capability or flexibility. In some regions, offering country-specific connectivity can help to reduce data cost. In other regions, especially China and Southeast Asia, data protection rules and roaming regulations may restrict your ability to send data outside the country. We already offer Japan-specific SIMs, and we will now begin offering region-specific SIMs in other parts of the world.
Customers based in the US and Canada can see a preview on our pricing page, and customers everywhere can look forward to a formal announcement very soon!
Request 2: Can I pass authentication information as an option in soracom-cli?
This is a great question and we get it. Passing authentication information makes it easier to use the Soracom command line interface with the SORACOM Funk service and AWS Lambda. Timely request and as of today, this new feature is LIVE!
Request 3: Can you extend the binary parser to include a program to turn it into JSON?
The binary parser is useful for raising data from embedded devices, and we know that you’ll want to use it in a variety of ways. In addition to including a program that parses binaries into JSON, we’ve also received requests to support 64-bit integers (for timestamps) and array types (the length is in the data).
This is exactly the capability offered through the SORACOM Orbit inline processing service that we released in July! It allows customers to write their own code on the SORACOM platform and then process the communication data. We’ve now also made a few tweaks to make Orbit even simpler to use:
• SORACOM Orbit Update: TinyGo SDK released!
• SORACOM API test environment “Sandbox” now supports SORACOM Orbit.
Request 4: How do I create a copy of a SIM group?
There are a lot of cases where you might want to create a new SIM group by copying one that already exists. For example, if the basic settings are the same, but you just want to change the Beam entry point, it would be simplest to create a group based on the existing settings rather than creating it from scratch.
And you should be able to do that! So we’ve added a “copy” button to the SIM group screen, as shown below:
Request 5: Can you make it easy to see when a SIM card last sent or received data?
Yes! This is really useful both for troubleshooting and for overall network management. Especially as your fleet grows, it gets more important to be able to quickly identify “lazy” connections. It’s also helpful to be able to see at a glance how long an offline SIM has been inactive. You may want to suspend or terminate SIMs that haven’t sent or received data for a while, or swap them to devices that or more active.
We’ve added a field to the SIM list in the user console so that you can easily track when each connection last sent or received data.
Request 6: Can I specific a source IP for SORACOM Napter?
Yes you can! This is a common request for cases where, for example, you might want to deny all inbound communication to a device except for communication that originates from SORACOM Napter.
The source IP for SORACOM Napter is “100.127.10.16”!
(This is also listed in the restrictions in the SORACOM Napter User Guide).
Request 7: Can you add a GPS multi-unit icon to the Soracom Icon Set?
Here you go!
Download the full Soracom Icon Set from the Soracom Developer Site
Happy 2021!
Thank you to everyone for so many great feature requests. Be sure to follow Soracom on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to learn about upcoming products and services!
