iLABs shipped the Challenger+ RP2350, a Feather-compatible board that pairs the Raspberry Pi RP2350 (dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 or dual-core RISC-V at 150 MHz) with an STMicroelectronics ST87M01 NB-IoT module covering LTE Cat NB2 worldwide bands, plus GPS L1 and Galileo for outdoor positioning and 802.11b scanning for indoor location fallback. The board includes 8MB PSRAM, 8MB flash, a LiPo charger, and drops to 0.5 uA in power-off mode.
Why this combination matters:
NB-IoT and GNSS on a single Feather board cuts the BOM for outdoor tracking and remote sensor applications to one PCB. The traditional approach -- MCU + cellular module + GPS module -- involves three separate procurement lines, three sets of firmware drivers, and significant board area. iLABs is making the integration bet that most of these designs have similar enough requirements to justify it at the module level.
The RP2350 angle:
The RP2350's ability to switch between Arm Cortex-M33 and Hazard3 RISC-V cores at compile time is still an underused differentiator. For an NB-IoT tracker, you're probably picking Arm for ecosystem reasons -- but the RISC-V option remains relevant for organizations with existing RISC-V toolchain investments.
What to watch:
The ST87M01 is not yet widely used in production IoT designs, which means driver maturity and AT command compatibility with different NB-IoT network operators will be a practical issue. The board sells for $60 USD -- reasonable for development, but the question is whether iLABs or the community will carry the firmware integration work needed to make this a go-to module for production designs.