The Arduino MKR NB 1500 is now available for immediate shipment from mouser.com and digikey.com.
I've had mine for 2 weeks now; surprised there is still no official release from the Arduino Store.
It would also be nice to have a separate listing under "MKR Boards" for it here.
Fair warning: No SMS capability yet through Arduino libraries. Lots to talk about there; board seems very buggy -- maybe that's the reason for the delay on the Arduino store side?
Also FYI: Like the 1400, the 1500 ships WITHOUT antenna and WITHOUT SIM.
The MKR NB 1500 is for sale from the Arduino Store, but only if you have your location set to "Europe/Africa". I guess the "America, Asia and Oceania" distributors haven't been stocked yet.
A couple other people have also requested that a forum section for this board be created. I think that is a very good idea:
I hope you'll have some good luck working with your new board. I think the new and shiny Arduino boards are best suited for adventurous trail blazers looking for challenges and opportunities to contribute to the Arduino project. The support for each new board gets better over time but in the early days it's often a bit lacking, most especially when it comes to the community support.
Thanks, Pert. Title of my original post edited to reflect it's just the US store.
The board itself seems solid, and the network connect time for the NB modem is delightfully short. However, the lack of official SMS support is a bit dismaying. On a whim, I did a quick-and-dirty port of the GSM SMS library for the NB 1500 -- and it worked! I was able to receive SMS's using my Hologram data card. However, as I feared, the story was too good to be true: using any type of SMS operation seemed to either lock up the board/modem completely, or at least prevent it from opening up a TCP socket for outgoing messages. Going back to a pre-SMS state seemed to bring it mostly right again. I also just received a Particle Boron, which uses the same modem. Guess what? No SMS support there, either.
Hey, like you said, it's the price of being an early adopter of the shiny new hardware. Hopefully it gets sorted out sometime; it's certainly a big enough issue where I won't be the only one who would like to see it fixed.
