My mailbox is in a block of other mailboxes that is fairly far from my home (say, 500m) and out of wifi range without an especially large antenna. I was thinking of making a small battery-powered widget to tell me when the mail arrived and adding it to my Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) installation.
Another use may be something like a device that warns if a locked, remote, storage area is accessed. In fact, almost any alarm system that lacks a cellular backup could add one pretty cheaply with this.
Now that I know this exists, I'm going to use it as a bag tracker to tell me where my baggage went when I travel. I'll probably just get one and use it as my car tracker to tell me when to move for street parking. Or maybe I can just inactive it.
How will you deal with charging? As far as I know connectivity has been a solved problem for over a decade now (on a small scale you could always just get a consumer SIM and use that), but power consumption is a problem. This is why Tile trackers for example use BLE tags and nearby phones instead of just embedding a SIM in their trackers.
The baggage only needs an infrequent duty cycle, right? Like once an hour should do the trick. I don't think I have to attach a large enough battery that I need to not put it in luggage. If it doesn't work out it doesn't.
https://www.eatabit.io is built on it. We were one of their first beta clients. We used every M2M carrier previously and Twilio is easily superior in cost & reliability. The cellular data space has alot of problems especially with roaming: cell phones transparently switch between networks but data SIMs have a very limited set of networks they can operate on. If Twilio can get VZW access on these SIMs they will have a very strong product. As it stands, coverage is limited.
