Enclosures and Antennas

Limmat is a gateway platform that allows you to bring your own gateway product to market faster and with less risk compared to designing it yourself from scratch. We have created a reference board design (Limmat V1.1) that can be used as is, and which is ready for RF certification. This is the board that we will make available to prospective licensees as part of our Limmat Evaluation Kit. It measures 100 mm by 50 mm, which makes it suitable for various off-the-shelf enclosures that use the Eurocard form factor. You can choose one of these products, or design a custom enclosure for the board.

In this blog post, I show you pictures of three different enclosures. The first is an off-the-shelf 105 x 80 x 30 mm aluminum Eurocard enclosure. The second is a custom variant of a similar enclosure, 105 x 50 x 24 mm. The third is a custom 3D-printed enclosure that we created for demonstration purposes.

The back panel with labels was custom-made for the aluminum enclosures. Customizing the front panel with your corporate design is possible as well, of course.

As you can see, different antenna options are possible. Generally, a larger antenna means better reception.

We performed our RF measurements primarily with the 3D-printed enclosure with short antennas on the one hand, as the plastic material does not create a Faraday cage and therefore the risk of RF interference is higher. On the other hand, we also took measurements with the off-the-shelf enclosure with long antennas, because we recommend this as a the default choice for industrial applications.

The enclosures shown here use the Limmat V1.1 reference board. This is only one instance of the Limmat gateway platform - it is easy to modify the design in various ways, one of them of course being the board's footprint. Limmat is all about giving you options for your gateway products - from mechanical design to electronics, firmware and even cloud components.