No one can accuse Amazon of thinking small. The cloud services giant recently introduced the Amazon Sidewalk Internet of Things (IoT) network and invited developers to explore Sidewalk and start working on connecting the next billion devices to the network. Sidewalk is a secure, low-bandwidth, long-range network that reaches up to 90% of the U.S. population, Amazon claims. Amazon invites developers to ask for a Sidewalk software development kit (SDK) to get started.
Dave Limp, Senior Vice President of Amazon Devices & Services, stated that Amazon Sidewalk addresses significant limitations of Wi-Fi and cellular networks. This includes Wi-Fi’s limited range and the costly nature of cellular networks. Amazon Sidewalk gives developers secure, persistent cloud connectivity at low-cost, opening the gate for developers to build devices such as environmental sensors, leak detectors, and smart locks.
Amazon also announced that Nordic Semiconductor, Silicon Labs, and Texas Instruments developed SDKs and Hardware Development kits (HDKs) that work with Sidewalk. IoT solution provider Quectel also introduced a hardware device module including a selection of antennas that are all compatible with Amazon Sidewalk. In addition to the various SDKs and HDKs, developers can configure new Sidewalk devices with the AWS IoT of Amazon Sidewalk. This list of available development tools and resources goes on and on. Clearly Amazon wants to solidify its major cloud services position by encouraging developers to build new devices compatible with the service.
If you’d like to try out Amazon Sidewalk, you can request a test kit to start building your own devices.
