Understanding Evergateway, Evergateway 2.0 (Apex) and USB Gateway Dongle

Evergateway Appliances

There are two types of gateway appliances.

• Evergateway 1.0, a light grey plastic enclosure housing a Dell 3001 IOT gateway.  These devices were sold and comissioned by Psikick / Everactive from 2018 until 2022.
  
  
• Evergateway 2.0 (Apex), a purpose-built dark grey industrial IOT PC.  This gateway and its interior components were designed by Everactive.

Both generations of gateway run an Ubuntu linux stack.  Both use 4G LTE modems to connect to multiple carriers via a smart roaming SIM card.

USB Mini Gateway

In 2022 with the release of Evaluation and Developer kits, a lighter weight alternative is available for testing.  This form factor is a USB dongle, which uses a VMWare image running on a host OS.  The host computer can be a PC or Mac with an Intel processor running VMWare Workstation player or VMWare fusion.  In this configuration, the host computer's internet connection will transmit the data to the cloud, no LTE connectivity is present in the USB dongle.

Software behavior

Regardless of the hardware, all three types of gateways use the same Ubuntu Core OS to manage network communications and interface with sensors.  The same measurements are taken at the sensors, and the resulting data in the cloud does not differ.  All three gateways are capable of storing some amount of sensor data if the connection to the cloud is severed.  In this case, data will be stored and sent to the cloud when the internet connection is restored.

Performance

The only observable behavior difference between the appliances and the USB gateway is transmit power.  The transmit power on appliance gateways is 30db.  Due to variance in USB ports, the USB gateway is capped at 26db from the factory. 

This will affect the range between the sensor and the virtual gateway. 

Typical USB 1.0 and 2.0 ports, deliver up to 500 mA or 0.5A. This supports 26db transmission but not 30db.  USB 3.0 ports can can provide up to 900mA or 0.9A, which supports higher power transmission.

If you're evaluating the USB gateway with a qualified higher-power USB port, and you'd like to have the power restriction removed, contact developers@everactive.com to arrange a firmware modification.