25 dev boards to help you get started on your next IoT project

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A closer look at some of today’s most popular development boards to help you get started on your next IoT design.

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With billions of everyday objects expected to become Internet-enabled over the next couple of years, Makers are continually seeking new ways to add connectivity to their designs. As a result, hobbyists and engineers are turning to a wide range of IoT development boards and platforms to better accelerate and ease the process.

Being at the heart of the IoT and all, we’ve decided to compile a list of just some of today’s most popular, Atmel powered ones that will surely help as you embark on your next prototype or project. (Keep in mind, there are countless others, with new ones popping up on the daily!)

SAM R21 Xplained Pro

The Atmel | SMART SAM R21 Xplained Pro is a hardware platform to evaluate the ATSAMR21G18A microcontroller. Supported by the Atmel Studio integrated development platform, the kit provides easy access to the features of the Atmel ATSAMR21G18A and explains how to integrate the device in a custom design. The Xplained Pro MCU series evaluation kits include an on-board Embedded Debugger, and no external tools are necessary to program or debug the ATSAMR21G18A. A great option for those developing an 802.15.4/ZigBee design.

Arduino Uno

The Arduino Uno R3 is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which six can be used as PWM outputs), six analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. Simply connect it to a computer via a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.

Arduino Yún

The Arduino Yún is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega32U4 and the Atheros AR9331. The board comes with built-in Ethernet and Wi-Fi support, along with a USB-A port, microSD card slot, 20 digital input/output pins (of which seven can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a micro USB connection, an ICSP header, and three reset buttons. What’s more, Facebook’s Parse recently unveiled a new line of SDKs for connected devices with the first Arduino SDK targeted for the Yún.

Arduino Pro Mini

Intended for semi-permanent installation in connected objects, the Arduino Pro Mini is based on the ATmega328. The board boasts 14 digital input/output pins (of which six can be used as PWM outputs), six analog inputs, an on-board resonator, a reset button, and holes for mounting pin headers. A six-pin header can be connected to an FTDI cable or Sparkfun breakout board to provide USB power and communications.

Arduino Nano

The Arduino Nano is a small, breadboard-friendly board based on the ATmega328. The microcontroller has more or less the same functionality of the Arduino Duemilanove, but in a different package. It lacks a DC power jack, and works with a Mini-B USB cable instead of a standard one.

Pinoccio

With an Atmel ATmega256RFR2 at its core, Pinoccio is a wireless, web-ready MCU packed with Wi-Fi, LiPo battery and a built-in radio. Each unit can communicate with one another using a mesh network, making them 14 times more efficient than standard Wi-Fi devices.

TinyDuino

The TinyCircuits TinyDuino is an Arduino-compatible, ATmega328P based board in an ultra-compact package that provides Makers with the full power of an Uno in a size that’s less than a quarter.

UDOO

UDOO is a multi-development platform solution for Android, Linux, Arduino and Google ADK 2012. The board, which is built upon an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and Atmel | SMART SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, is designed to provide a flexible environment that lets Makers explore the new frontiers of the Internet of Things and switch between Linux and Android in a matter of seconds, simply by replacing the MicroSD card and rebooting the system.

Libelium Waspmote

Waspmote is an open-source, ATmega1281 based wireless sensor platform specially focused on the implementation of low consumption modes to enable the sensor nodes to be completely autonomous and battery powered, offering a variable lifetime between one and five years depending on the duty cycle and the radio used.

The AirBoard

The AirBoard is a thumb-sized, all-in-one MCU designed for ultra-fast prototyping on IoT projects. The open-source board is equipped with an ATmega328P and pre-loaded with the standard Arduino Fio bootloader. The wireless-friendly computer supports automatic over-the-air programming via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or XBee, and can be controlled by smartphone or the web.

Tessel 2

Tessel 2 is an affordable, accessible and robust development platform that lets Makers build connected hardware devices. The board packs built-in Wi-Fi, an Ethernet jack, a pair of USB ports, and a system that runs real Node.js/io.js. Meanwhile, it employs a processor/coprocessor architecture, combining an Atmel | SMART SAM D21 Cortex M0+ MCU to control I/O and a Mediatek MT7260n Wi-Fi router SoC to run user code, host USB devices and handle the network connections.

panStamps

panStamps are small wireless modules programmable within the Arduino IDE. Each module contains an Atmega328P MCU and an RF interface, providing the necessary connectivity and processing power to create autonomous low-power wireless motes.

Flutter

Flutter is a $36 wireless Arduino with a half-mile range that lets users develop mesh networking protocols and connected devices in an efficient yet inexpensive manner. It’s perfect for robotics, consumer electronics, wireless sensor networks, and educational platforms. Flutter is packed with a powerful Atmel | SMART SAM3S Cortex-M3 processor, while an ATSHA204 crypto engine keeps it protected from digital intruders.

SODAQ

SODAQ is a LEGO-like rapid prototyping board driven by an ATmega328P that gives Makers and engineers the ability to easily connect a wide variety of sensors and devices to the Internet efficiently. With its solar powered data acquisition technology, data can be collected virtually anywhere and seamlessly transferred to the web.

IMUduino BTLE

Billed as the smallest Arduino Leonardo compatible clone, the IMUduino includes an ATmega32U4 at its core, as well as USB keyboard/mouse emulation, on-board Bluetooth LE, real-time orientation and motion sensing IMU, as well as a 10V max voltage regulator.

SparkFun RedBoard

The SparkFun RedBoard combines the simplicity of the Arduino Uno’s Optiboot bootloader, the stability of the FTDI and the R3 shield compatibility of the latest Arduino Uno. The ATmega328 based board can be programmed over a USB Mini-B cable using the Arduino IDE.

XinoRF

The XinoRF is an Arduino-compatible electronics development board with an onboard 2-way Ciseco SRF data radio, which supports over-the-air programming, features built-in wireless capabilities and is powered by an ATmega328P.

The Rascal

The Rascal is a small, AT91SAM9G20 powered computer that Makers can use to monitor and control their connected world remotely. In addition, it features its own web-based editor on-board, is compatible with most Arduino shields, and can be programmed in Python.

Microduino

Microduino is a quarter-sized Arduino-like board with an ATmega328P at its heart. With a unique UPin-27 pinout, Microduino’s plug-and-play modules can be easily stacked together to add functionalities.

Nanode

Nanode is an open-source, Arduino-like board that is equipped with built-in Internet connectivity and based on an ATmega328P. The low-cost, upgradeable board is ideal for those looking to bring their IoT ideas to life.

OpenKontrol Gateway

The OpenKontrol Gateway is an ATmega328 driven kit that enables communication between many common mediums and protocols. It is totally compatable with the Arduino IDE and supports Wi-Fi, low-power RF, Ethernet and Bluetooth. Beyond that, it can be configured with on-board SRAM, an SD card, a real-time clock, and a coin-cell battery and sports an FTDI programming port.

Arietta G25

Arietta G25 is an uber-mini system-on-module powered by a SAM9G25 ARM9 processor. The 20mm x 50mm board, which was developed with the Maker community in mind, is ideal for low-power, embedded gadgets and other DIY IoT devices.

WIOT

WIOT is an open-source, rechargeable development board for the Internet of Things built around the ATmega32U4. WIOT also boasts integrated Wi-Fi capabilities through an on-board ESP8266 module.

SmartEverything

SmartEverything is a dev board equipped with sensor options, communication interfaces and connection to the cloud for IoT designs. An Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M0+ based CPU USB host orchestrator chip manages traffic between peripherals, while an Atmel CryptoAuthentication device (ATSHA204) enables the implementation of a full security SHA-256 hash algorithm with message authentication code. The board utilizes the SIGFOX global network cellular connectivity solution to enable access to the IoT.

Apio

Apio is an open-source IoT platform, which lets Makers and designers create their own smart systems and connected objects in a matter of minutes. It is comprised of two USB devices, the General and Dongle, both of which are based on an ATmega256RFR2 and ATmega16U2, along with a custom operating system and SDK.

LightBlue Bean

The LightBlue Bean is a Bluetooth Low Energy, Arduino-compatible microcontroller. Using Bluetooth 4.0, it is wirelessly programmed, runs on a coin cell battery and is perfect for smartphone-controlled projects. Powered by an ATmega328P, the board features a three-axis accelerometer, a temperature sensor, an RGB LED, and includes iOS, OS X and Windows 8 support.

Keeping consumables real

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The most cost-effective and secure way to keep things real is through symmetric authentication without secret storage on the host using a fixed challenge.

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With the ever present threat of counterfeiting, having a cost-effective and highly-secure way to ensure that a consumable product is real is a great idea. In fact, there is a proven industry standard approach to apply sophisticated cryptographic engineering and mathematics to fight counterfeiting; namely, crypto elements like the Atmel ATSHA204A device.

Crypto elements can attach to a consumable good, such as the classic example of an ink cartridge, even without being soldered in. The device can be glued directly outside of the product. When the ink or other consumable is inserted into the host system (where the MCU is), the crypto element makes contact and the host is able to communicate with the item to validate whether or not it is real. This is called authentication.

The most cost-effective yet secure way to authenticate is through symmetric authentication without secret storage on the host using a fixed challenge.

With symmetric authentication, a client and the host run the exact same calculation on each side, and if the client (the consumable) is real, then the results of those calculations (called the “responses”) will match. There is a way to go about using a very inexpensive MCU without running the crypto calculations within the host side’s MCU. That is where the concept of fixed challenge comes into play. The idea of a fixed challenge is that the calculation done for the host is conducted ahead of time, and the challenge/response pair from that calculation is loaded into the host.

The fixed challenge method is ideal when certain considerations are in play, such as the folowing:

1. Very limited processing power (e.g. low-cost MCU)
2. Abundance of available memory to easily store challenge-response pairs (e.g. in a smartphone)
3. Need to get something out quickly or temporarily (e.g. time to market)
4. Need a very low cost on the host (e.g. can’t afford adding a key storage device)
5. Desire to not store a secret key in the host

So, how does a fixed challenge work? Like with other challenge-response operations, the process starts with the host controller sending the client a numerical challenge to be used in a calculation to create a response, which then gets compared to a “response” number in the host. What makes this “fixed” is that, because there is no crypto device in the host to generate random numbers (or make digests using hashing algorithms), the challenge cannot be random. That means that the challenges and their corresponding responses must be pre-calculated using the client’s secret key and the challenge and response pair loaded into the memory of the host. This can be looked at as effectively time-shifting the calculations used for authentication.

Let’s look at an example using the ATSHA204A installed in the client.

Step 1: In the factory when the host manufactured challenges are loaded into the host MCU memory together with a response that is calculated by hashing the client’s secret with that challenge.

Step 2: When the consumable is inserted into the host machine out in the field, the host MCU will ask the client (consumable) to prove it is real by sending it the preloaded challenge.

Step 3: The client will then run the hash algorithm on that challenge number using its stored secret key to generate a response, which it sends back to the host.

Step 4: The host will compare the response from the clients with the preloaded response value stored in its memory.

Step 5: If the client is real, the response from the client (which is the hash value based on the secret key and the challenge) will be the same as the response value that was preloaded in the host.

Since each host is loaded with a different challenge/response pair, each product that the host is incorporated into is then unique by definition. Cloning beyond only one copy is impossible; thus, this is a highly-secure and very cost-effective technique as it can be easily implemented with very inexpensive MCUs.

This approach can be used for firmware protection and designs with no secrets in the host (as noted), as well as be implemented with very low-cost MCUs that do not have the processing power to run the hashing algorithms.

The many benefits of fixed challenge authentication:

• Symmetric authentication is fast
• No secrets in the host
• Can use low-cost MCU of host because less computation is needed for a fixed challenge
• Prevents cloning
• Protects investments in firmware
• Enhances safety
• Protects revenue stream
• Protects brand image
• Better control of the supply channel

Atmel crypto element devices — including ATSHA204A, ATECC108A, ATECC508A and ATAES132A — implement hardware-based key storage, which is much stronger than software based storage due to the defense mechanisms that only hardware can provide against attacks. Secure storage in hardware beats storage in software every time. Adding secure key storage is an inexpensive, easy, and ultra-secure way to protect firmware, software, and hardware products from cloning, counterfeiting, hacking, and other malicious threats.

Felted Terrain is an interactive wool landscape

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This installation allows users to interact with kitted fabric in an audible, visual and tactile manner. 

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Inspired by the rolling, mossy landscape of Iceland, Felted Terrain translates the shapes of a natural environment through the generation of three-dimensional, interactive textile. When installed as a piece of furniture, surface and sensory outlet, the knitted fabric is able to transcend beyond its familiarity as merely a clothing material, and lets users experience it in ways never before conceived.

The project, which is the brainchild of Maker and recent MIT MArch graduate Yihyun Lim, attempts to subvert the notion of felted textile typically used throughout the handmade craft world by integrating various soft electronics, computational design and alternative means of fabrication.

Lim used a circle packing script to generate a knitting pattern in Rhino3D. Once created, conductive thread was knitted together with wool yarn at the center of each circle to make capacitive sensor tips. Each of these points were stitched back to an Arduino Lilypad (ATmega328), which was loaded with a modified CapSense Arduino code. Meanwhile, an XBee module was employed to wirelessly connect the computer to the textile.

The received serial data was then transferred to a Processing script, so that every time a bump was touched, the circuit connects and translates into a sound and a sine wave graph. The size of each circle corresponds to the pitch of a musical note, which enables a tactile touch to not only be felt, but heard and visualized as well.

The Terrain was knitted using a hand-operated machine in one square meter patches. Completed sections were sewn together and underwent multiple washings as part of its shrinking process to create a tightly-packed felt textile. These pieces were then formed and air dried to retain the shape of bumps.

Intrigued?Head over to the project’s official page here.

IT cloud vs. IoT cloud

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Kaivan Karimi, Atmel VP and GM of Wireless Solutions, shares the top 10 factors to consider when transitioning from IT cloud to IoT cloud.

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In mid-2013, the buzz phrase “Internet of Things,” also known as the “IoT,” set the technology world on fire. As a result of this craze, a lot of products that were developed for completely different end applications changed all their marketing collateral overnight to become IoT products. We saw companies that added the acronym “IoT” to the title of every executive and gadgets that became a part of an IoT enablement ecosystem. New tradeshows claimed their authoritative position on IoT, and angel investors and venture capitalists started IoT funds feeding incredible ideas — some which reminded me of the late 1990s bubble when Lemonade.com was funded. New standard bodies were formed around provisioning IoT devices, and all of a sudden, overnight, most of us in the technology community became IoT experts.

Cloud companies are not an exception. While the physical infrastructure of the cloud didn’t change, the platform and software services that were developed for enterprise IT management and mobility apps support became IoT PaaS & SaaS platforms with claims of “IoT compliance.” By late 2013, at an IoT event in Barcelona, every keynote not only talked about the “metaphorical pyramid” of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), but almost every keynote talked about “Everything as a Service (EaaS)” thanks to IoT.

With so much hype and noise, it is hard to separate fact from fiction — unless you dig deep, really deep. This fuzziness is caused by the breath of IoT and the many vertical markets it encompasses, covering all aspects of life as we know it. And each vertical has its own unique “things,” so one size doesn’t fit all from a device perspective, requiring different types of standards and transport layers with silicon and software infrastructure to support this vast frontier. What has further muddied the water is that many large industry players look at IoT as an inflection point that they can transform themselves to something else and get into other businesses. Because of this, these players are looking at their current assets and are defining the infrastructure required for IoT differently than what logically and technically makes sense. For companies that have no play in hardware or software for the data centers, they publicly promote that the majority of the data processing should be done in other parts of the network (“closer to the source”). And, while the others promote just the opposite, a third group advocates that much of the processing should be done directly by the hierarchy of smart gateways boxes in the customer premises, along with everything in-between. The same goes for the choice of RF communications protocols, gateways, definition of things, provisioning schemes, etc.

A great example of what gets heavily promoted by one of the biggest industry players is calling IoT an “always ON revolution” and allowing sensor data collected at the edge/sensing nodes (thing side) to ALWAYS be sent to the cloud. This method requires a lot of bandwidth and storage capacity to collect data in the cloud, and encourages the promotion of their passive big data analytics capabilities to process this volume of data in the cloud. Clearly they sell hammers here, and see everything in the world as a nail. In reality IoT is a “mostly OFF revolution,” with significantly less data created than portrayed, and few of that data will make it to the cloud. For instance:

1. A door or a key lock is mostly sleeping, until a sensor triggers a wake-up command during an opening or proximity event, in which case it communicates a few bytes of data to a gateway and then goes back to sleep.
2. The temperature sensors on a bridge wakes-up every so often to report temperature fluctuation to the gateway on the side of the road, and report if the bridge is frozen and then telling the department of transportation to send the sand trucks to avoid accidents.
3. The seismic sensors on the A/C unit in an office building located in Texas monitoring of the sound of the motor every 2 hours. If the motor sounds as if it will be breaking down in a couple weeks, the sensors inform the building manager to call a technician to fix what is going bad, so that they will not be stuck without air conditioning in the middle of July.
4. The ethylene gas sensors (ripening phytohormone of fruits and plants) on fruit containers in the back of an eighteen wheeler wake up every 30 minutes and send the data to the gateway in the cabin of the truck. These signals predict the decay rate of the fruit and allow the driver to change the destination to a close by city if needed, and give some additional shelf life to the fruit, or allowing the driver to send the fruits straight to the jam factory, avoiding fuel waste of carrying a bad cargo.

In each of the aforementioned cases, and in other examples similar to these, the things (fruit container, A/C unit, bridge, home door, etc.) spend a majority of their time sleeping and only wake up based on an event trigger or predetermined wake up time based on programmed policy. This is the only way these devices can operate on batteries for years of usage. How many bytes (not mbps or even kbps) of data is really required to report those events? Would all of these events be worthy of sending to the cloud? In fact, the local event processing and analytics engine running on the local gateway will determine what will go to the cloud and only the exception events (door is open, fruit is going bad, motor is going to break down, bridge is frozen, etc.) will go to the cloud right away. But, as long as everything is normal (within policy range events), it will get registered on predetermined intervals (e.g. once every 24 hours) and the meta data will get uploaded to the cloud. Even if video capture was involved, no more than 2Mbps of bandwidth is needed.

Based on my experience with the analysis of multiple large enterprise campuses with many buildings, without video for IoT-type services, only an aggregate level of 15Mbps bandwidth max is required to fully support this type of IoT communication to the cloud for provisioning services. So one should question the folks who promote the fallacy that all types of applications, things will always be ON and lots of bandwidth will be needed. What’s in it for them to portray IoT in this manner? Of course if you are considering an enterprise campus full of smart devices with people moving massive amount of data with “chatty and persistent communication agents”, then you will need a lot more than 15mbps of connectivity to cloud, for sure. Could it be these folks are confusing an IT infrastructure with an IoT infrastructure?

For a comprehensive IoT implementation, a system-level approach is required to cover the tiniest edge/sensing nodes (things), to various types of gateways, all the way to the cloud and data centers, applications and service providers. These include data analytic engines embedded both on premise and in the cloud with a variety of SDKs and communication agents, data caching and bandwidth management as different layer and levels of hierarchy, etc. There aren’t many companies in the world that cover all of these (single-digit) items. Even if they do, these companies still require partnerships with the gadget/things side companies. Therefore, when someone claims that they are a one-stop shop, they can either: support an existing infrastructure of things to a cloud and add a new twist to it (subset of most IoT verticals), OR their system is not as comprehensive as they claim, OR ultimately a combination of both.

Not to mention, at this moment we are exclusively dealing with silo-ed clouds, and silo-ed IoT systems. While an ecosystem of cloud (cloud of clouds) is in a nascent stage for some companies, it is far from a true IoT cloud ecosystem that it will become in the near future.

The IT cloud ecosystem (versus the IoT cloud ecosystem) has had a journey of its own in the past few years. This ecosystem has shown signs of success as originally predicted with the technology distributed to provide a virtually seamless and infinite environment for communications, storage, computing, Web and mobile services, analytics, and other business uses. The cloud benefit model has come to fruition, with many examples of upfront CAPEX largely minimized or eliminated. This includes increased flexibility and control to scale users and the ability to add functionality by various organizations on demand, with the added pay-as-you-go benefit. Cloud providers have taken over the responsibility of IT requirements for many organizations, and have become vital business and channel partners.

That said, the fundamental question still remains: Is the traditional IT cloud and its ecosystem the same as an IoT cloud and its ecosystem?

The answer: While 60-70 percent is the same, a 30-40 percent difference can kill your IoT roll-out and make a seemingly IoT-ready cloud almost useless for your applications.

The differences are present throughout the full end-to-end system, from the “thing” side, all the way to the data centers on the cloud side. The traditional IT cloud, web or mobility applications cloud mirrors much bigger devices with more resources on the cloud side. Over the last couple of years, a “thing” for the traditional cloud system consisted of a computer, a vending machine, a car, a gateway in customer premise, or a smart device (laptops, tablets, Smartphone, etc.). These devices are typically connected to the cloud via direct cellular links, a cellular (WAN) + Wi-Fi (LAN), or Fiber (WAN) + Wi-Fi (LAN). With the new generation of IoT “things,” you can find much more resource-constrained devices such as small battery operated sensors on doorways to keep track of people entering through the back gate of the house, battery-operated seismic sensors on roadway infrastructures (bridges, etc.), or any of the examples earlier. Instead of 20 smart devices in an office that are plugged into the wall outlet or through a large battery capacity recharging on a regular basis, you will be dealing with 500 different types of sensors and things covering that office. With multiple offices, 1000s of things at the same time, most of which are powered by batteries for years (4-5 years of battery life in consumer IoT, and 8-12 years of battery life in industrial IoT). Some of these things have a small 8-bit MCU as its brain, with very little memory and other resources, and may be hiding behind layers of gateways, relays, switches, even other things, in sleepy networks. The communication link when available (remember that they are mostly in an off state), may have very little bandwidth, and communication may go through multiple hops in mesh networks. A “Chatty” communication system that pings on the things on regular basis defeats the purpose here.

The important thing is to remember that a system needs to be fully extendable and scalable not just on the cloud side, but also on the link side from the cloud to the things–and finally on the thing side. You also need scalable data capture and aggregation to go along with a secure communication system. If you are targeting a consumer application, then a solid mobile application development platform working with your popular Smartphone operating system is a basic requirement, meaning you need to rewrite your middleware to become more agile, scalable, and be able to manage many more things simultaneously. You also need to rethink your whole communication topologies of the past. Lastly you need to pay more attention to your analytic engines and applications development environment, and depending on your IoT application, it may require completely different visualization tools and business models.

Here are some factors that an IT cloud provider transitioning to an IoT cloud provider needs to consider:

• Understand the verticals you target; become a one-stop shop for a given vertical. In IoT, one size does not fit all. Understanding a vertical includes the evolution of that vertical and future business models that need to be considered. For example, if you are targeting the tracking of people in a hospital and their location at any given time, in the future that group would require wearables with biometric sensors, and their vital statistics would also need to be monitored. The expectation would be that your service can also cover the tracking of biometric sensors, which are usually battery-operated constraint devices with minimal bandwidth. Working with one PaaS or SaaS supplier for managing one set of its assets in the same premise and another cloud provider for a separate set of assets is not an option. The issues to consider include the protocols, networks, bandwidth management and transport technologies your IoT cloud framework would need to support.

• Scalable data analytics and event processing engine is a must-have as the majority of the IoT value creation comes from the data analytics, and “data capital” is where the differentiation will come from. Do you have the right analytics engine on both the cloud side as well as the premise/gateways? The new in-memory streaming technologies which change the rate we can act on data will be required for some IoT applications. Hence the traditional extraction, transformation and loading (ETL)will give way to just in time (JIT) methodologies (real-time vs. batch-oriented). Can you manage fast/streaming data analytics processing for applications where extremely fast processing of (near) real-time data is required? For instance, in tele-health and elderly monitoring where passive data analytics in the cloud is not adequate, and local fast data analytics running on the local smart gateway is required to report a heart attack, or a fire in home automation, etc. Also it is imperative that you find a service provider for a given vertical—if you are not a service provider, partner with one—so that your event processing and data analytics engines are tuned for specific use cases and business logic. If your analytics engine only provides insight into the visibility or availability of a limited set of parameters in the network, work with a partner that brings the rest.

• Know the specific type of data required to monitor/gather, the insight required for your customers. That means developing a diverse set of device data models for specific functionalities. Don’t try to be the Swiss Army Knife of the IoT cloud providers. Remember, while a Swiss Army Knife can perform many functions, they are not good at doing anything well. Understanding the verticals you need to support (item number 1) will also help you with this item. For certain applications, before the data sets get processed by analytics and visualization tools, it gets combined with external algorithmic classification and enrichment tools. This increases productivity and ease-of-use dramatically (e.g. user will know where the water tables are before drilling for a well, or what the maps of other distribution centers are before redirecting a cargo).

• Develop a fully modularized end-to-end system. As most large OEMs may already have their own branded cloud and would only want to use a part of the functionality you offer. Arm yourselves with well defined APIs, and firewall-friendly adaptive connectivity architecture and become comfortable with working with your customers’ infrastructure, analytics engine, applications, visualization tools, things, etc. They may only be interested in your communication system. Or, ask for a mix of capabilities. The more flexible your approach, the better you can customize your offerings to their needs. On the cloud side, the formation of the cloud ecosystem (cloud of clouds – server to server(s) communication) is right around the corner. A robust ecosystem is at the heart of the IoT cloud management.

A modularized system as described above may mean a different tiered pricing approach to your business model. Flexibility needs to extend beyond your technology offerings, so be open to new business models.

• Follow the new service delivery frameworks with large ecosystems, such as the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), etc. Standardization will eventually dominate both the consumer and industrial IoT space. While the alphabet soup of protocols may be expanding (e.g. MQTT, XMPP, DDS, AMQP, CoAP, RESTful HTTP, etc.), standardization is also happening and provide more clarity. Standards are being developed so there are “horses for different courses.” Get used to the idea that your proprietary system of today requires an upgrade to a standard system tomorrow or your ecosystem will leave you behind. How would you change your system today with that knowledge in hand?

• Develop RF communication specialization (Cellular, WiFi, BLE, 802.15.4/Zigbee, 6LowPan, subGig, SigFox, etc), or partner with someone who has that expertise. A lot of the IT Cloud companies today have a big gap here and need to find a partner to optimize their IT Cloud to use such complex RF Communication protocols. They also need to optimize their systems based on the type of RF links and bandwidth limitations they will be using. This also affects the application development side, as such customization is essential for IoT, and what normally works for Cellular might not work for WiFi or BLE or Zigbee, etc. This is especially important to consider when it comes to target vertical markets, as different verticals might need different RF communication protocols or even multiple ones simultaneously, with all the coexistence issues that one may encounter. A semiconductor partner, who understands your IoT cloud requirements, can help you optimize your system from an RF communications and bandwidth management perspective.

• Whether you have an SDK or agent-based mechanism, implement a lightweight communication system. Typical SDKs make the development and management of mobile apps easy, but remember that your smart phone has a lot more resources on it than a tiny resource-constraint sensor feeding data into an IoT system. A lightweight SDK, or agent-based system is a lot more predictable and simpler to integrate into low memory or battery-operated devices. Lightweight agents reduce device complexity and cost and can incrementally add to their capabilities depending on where they reside on the system. Obviously the more ‘bells and whistles’ you add to your system on the thing side (number of statistics to track or alarm states), the larger footprint of your SDK or agent. As you move to gateway levels of hierarchy and have more types of mechanisms, functionalities, sensors, communications, and alarms to monitor, the size of your agent or SDK will grow. One size will not fit all, but be frugal with your application and data management. So far working with various IoT cloud ecosystem partners, I have seen SDK and agent sizes varying from 3K to 150K of memory footprint. IoT cloud journey has already started, and I have no doubt the higher end of the spectrum (and some of the intermediate steps) will be shrinking in the near future, while the caching mechanism will become more robust.

Also deploy a context-centric bandwidth management system that won’t hog the entire bandwidth for your management plane activities. The rule of thumb will tell you not to occupy more than 15% of the communication link with intermediate proxy and caching functionality.

• Pay attention to “things” with the focus on ease-of-use. That means an easy way of provisioning a device that even a nascent thing developer can follow the steps and do it on their own, regardless of the transport technology or resources available. If it takes too long, is error prone or requires an army of your developers to port and customize/optimize your agent for a particular architecture, you will be reducing your target market to only the very large OEMs. If you assume that you will be doing it for services fees, it won’t scale and you will only be targeting the large OEMs. If you partner with software services houses, you will scale better and gain additional bandwidth at a cost. And, this will still be reducing your market footprint to companies that can afford to pay for provisioning services. Why not make it easy right up front for maximum customer coverage? From the syntax of your APIs for things/sensor, to local gateways, cloud gateways, programming your agent logic and communications and service APIs, focus on simplicity, ease-of-use, and the out-of-the-box experience for your customers/developers.

• Pay attention to visualization tools and user experience in all parts of the system. “Thing virtualization and visualization,” (including elegant and robust application that turns the device data models to comprehendible information in the cloud) are great value propositions. If you are focusing on the consumer IoT verticals where smart phones will have a prominent role, include a robust mobile apps development environment. IT cloud and IoT cloud have different consumers of data, and elegant visualization features can set you apart from your competitors.

• Last but not least, do you have a robust and hardened security and authentication mechanism that works with advance encryption algorithms? Do you support both ECC and AES-128/256? How about PUF based key generation mechanism? In IoT, the stakes are very high and you need to spend more attention to the security of the system, from the tiniest resource constraint thing all the way to the cloud. Please note that the security knowledgebase between the thing developers is low at the moment, and the cloud partner needs to bring some of the competence needed as well as enforcing best practices. Some basic elements on the thing side that need to be protected include secure boot, thing authentication, message encryption and integrity, and a trusted key management and storage scheme. A semiconductor partner who understands your IoT cloud requirements can help you optimize your system from a “thing” security perspective.

The transition from the IT cloud to the IoT cloud has already started, and as the IT cloud was a journey, the transformation to support IoT applications will also be a journey. What’s the best way to go about this change? Make this a comprehensive approach that will make your IoT cloud sustainable as the market transitions forward.

Revolar is a smart wearable device that’ll keep you safe

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A small wearable to solve a big problem.

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At one point or another, we’ve all been (or will one day be) in a situation where we do not feel safe and have limited access to loved ones. And as scary as it may sound, one in five women in America will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Designed to eradicate this statistic and to help spur a more security-conscious society, Revolar is a new wearable device that syncs with a smartphone’s emergency contacts via Bluetooth and acts as a “magic button” that sends out an SOS with a user’s exact GPS location.

The idea was first conceived by Revolar’s founder Jacqueline Ros after her sister was attacked multiple times before the age of 17. Subsequently, Ros was determined to find a solution and curb these sort of occurrences from ever happening again.

Just about the size of a quarter, Revolar can be discreetly placed just about anywhere, from a piece of jewelry, to a pocketbook or backpack, to a shirt or jacket collar. The device itself is comprised of two components: a communications module and its hard shell casing. Revolar features a drop-in system that also lets users to take the module and interchange it into a differently colored shell — currently available in white, blue and black — so that it can match with nearly any sort of attire.

How it works is easy. First, the unit is attached to an article of clothing, accessory or keychain. A user then inputs his or her emergency contacts into the Revolar mobile app. Only if and when assistance is required, the button is pressed. This sends the wearer’s exact GPS location to its respective recipients.

What’s nice, Revolar can be used by nearly everyone — kids can input the contact information of their parents or caregivers, campus police for college students, or colleagues for business travelers when abroad. Once activated, the user’s mobile phone will automatically switch phone settings to silent, if desired. As soon as a user feels safe, they can simply turn off the alert using their app PIN, and friends and family will be notified with a message that they are indeed okay.

“Our technology is built upon the most innovative Internet on Things Security Platform, which assures the integrity and confidentiality of our users data while enabling rapid development. This technology also enables secure device-to-device communications management,” the team writes.

Built around Atmel CryptoAuthentication devices, Revolar packs a whole lot of security features for such a tiny gadget. For one, users can take comfort in knowing that each wearable unit is as unique as the wearer themselves and cannot be cloned. Because of its chain of security, devices cannot be impersonated on the network either. Beyond that, data being communicated between each Revolar cannot be intercepted or manipulated by a third party.

Sound like something you or a loved one would like? Head over to Revolar’s official Kickstarter page, where the team is currently seeking $75,000. If all goes to plan, shipment is expected to begin early spring 2016.

Festo unveils a pair of insect-inspired robots

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These robotic ants and butterflies act like the real things.

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Well, it looks like Festo’s SmartBird, BionicKangaroo and BionicOpter are getting two new siblings. That’s because the German automation company has introduced the latest addition to its growing family of biomimetic robots: an ant and a butterfly.

The cooperative behavior of the real-life creatures is transferred to tech world using complex control algorithms. (Source: Festo)

First, the aptly named BionicANTS are designed to cooperatively operate. In other words, as a whole, they can complete complex tasks such as move larger objects, head to a specific location or conduct their own flash mob if they’d really like. Each 5.3-inch BionicANT is comprised of various components that are laser-sintered and finished with visible conductor structures and electrical circuits attached to its exterior.

The artificial ants can solve a complex task together working as an overall networked system. (Source: Festo)

A majority of the ant’s frame, as well as the electronic circuits located on the outside of its body, are 3D-printed. A radio module on its abdomen enables the robots to communicate with one another, while piezo-ceramic bending transducers are tasked with pushing movements, lifting its legs and activating its gripping jaws. A 3D stereo camera in the ant’s head allows it to see, an infrared optical sensor on its underside records the distance traveled, and a microprocessor distributes all the necessary signals. Beyond that, a pair of on-board Li-Po batteries provide up to 40 minutes of wireless power, before requiring to be recharged in a dock via their feelers.

Each butterfly is autonomous, using independently controllable wings to fly preprogrammed routes. (Source: Festo)

Similarly, the beautiful eMotionButterfly also uses collective behavior through an intelligent networking system. As they soar through the sky, they can manuever along pre-programmed paths inside special areas equipped with 10 high-speed infrared cameras — this keeps them from crashing into each other, walls or any other object. Each 20-inch butterfly weighs just 32 grams, and are equipped with two servo motors, some electronics and two small Li-Po batteries that gives them enough juice to fly at 2.5 meters per second for four minutes before they need to be recharged.

If you squint really, really hard… (Source: Festo)

Interested in learning more? Fly on over to Festo’s official page here, and be sure to watch both the ants and butterflies in action below.

Report: Half of consumers believe smart home devices will be mainstream by 2020

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New research from Bluetooth SIG shows that many folks are ready to live like the Jetsons.

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A survey conducted by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has revealed that nearly half (46%) of consumers believe smart home devices will be mainstream by 2020. The study had explored the attitudes of American, German and British consumers towards connected living, and as a whole, discovered tremendous excitement around not only potential applications but future installations, too.

Bluetooth SIG also that 6% of those surveyed already accepted that the era of the smart home has indeed arrived, with two-thirds (66%) thinking that smart home devices will be mainstream within the next decade. This strong consumer interest was tempered by their high expectations for simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

When asked what is required for commonplace purchases of such devices, 54% of respondents cited simplicity and straightforwardness in use with 41% believing that they should be easy to configure. Moreover, 28% suggested that these gadgets should connect seamlessly with a smartphone, tablet or PC. Nearly three-quarters (73%) admitted they would be frustrated if it took too long to set up a smart home unit.

“This study confirms consumers are looking for smart home products that ‘just work’,” added Mark Powell, Executive Director of the Bluetooth SIG. “It’s evident demand for smart home devices is ramping up and consumers are keen to live in the scenarios conjured up by the Jetsons over 60 years ago. Smart home manufacturers need to deliver products that are simple, cost-effective and secure for this segment to become mainstream.”

Evident by the sheer number of hacks and discovered flaws in recent months, it’s no surprise that 42% of consumers felt that keeping their data secure was paramount in the decision-making process. 67% of those surveyed were also concerned that some smart home devices would make their data vulnerable.

Despite all of the buzz surround intelligent appliances, like washing machines and kitchen gadgetry, the research unearthed that the hype is yet to materialize into actual demand from consumers. Keyword being ‘yet.’ In fact, the devices consumers find most appealing are highly convenient solutions that enable them to control their environment, such as smart heating/thermostats (45%), smart lighting (34%) and smart security/monitoring devices (33%).

As Bluetooth SIG explains, the results certainly conveyed a preference towards the smart home solutions that offer tangible benefits, ranging from controlling their heating or lighting remotely to cut down on bills (66%) to receiving smartphone notifications from their home security system if it detects a threat (73%).

The results showed a preference towards the smart home solutions that offer tangible benefits as well. For example, 66 percent of consumers say that being able to control their heating or lighting remotely would help them save energy and cut their energy bills. A further 73 percent would like to receive smartphone notifications from their home security system if it detects a threat.​

“It’s clear there is an appetite for these kinds of solutions but widespread adoption will require the use of mainstream connectivity technologies,” Powell concluded. “As we’ve seen in other segments, niche technologies simply cannot provide the simplicity, interoperability and security that consumers demand. Bluetooth Smart technology offers all those things with an enormous install base in smartphones, tablets and PCs, a simple pairing process and AES-128 bit cryptography for maximum security. While consumers feel smart home devices aren’t quite mainstream yet, Bluetooth is already paving the way for manufacturers to deliver the products consumers want. These manufacturers can also be confident in the knowledge that Bluetooth Smart has a development environment that makes it easy to bring these products to market.”

More than ever, consumers have high expectations for home appliances. With billions of connected devices expected in the coming years, users will demand sophisticated, feature-rich products that are reliable, easy-to-use, and most of all, secure. Whether it’s refrigeration, cooking or washing, Atmel has you covered. Want to continue reading? You can find all of Bluetooth SIG’s findings here.

Atmel’s SAM L21 MCU for IoT tops low power benchmark

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SAM L21 MCUs consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) juggernaut has unleashed a flurry of low-power microcontrollers, and in that array of energy-efficient MCUs, one product has earned the crown jewel of being the lowest-power Cortex M-based solution with power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode.

How do we know if Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontroller can actually claim the leadership in ultra-low-power processing movement? The answer lies in the EEMBC ULPBench power benchmark that was introduced last year. It ensures a level playing field in executing the benchmark by having the MCU perform 20,000 clock cycles of active work once a second and sleep the remainder of the second.

 

ULPBench shows SAM L21 is lower power than any of its competitor’s M0+ class chips.

Atmel has released the ultra-low-power SAM L21 MCU it demonstrated at Electronica in Munich, Germany back in November 2014. Architectural innovations in the SAM L21 MCU family enable low-power peripherals — including timers, serial communications and capacitive touch sensing — to remain powered and running while the rest of the system is in a reduced power mode. That further reduces power consumption for always-on applications such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical and connected wearables.

Next, the 32-bit ARM-based MCU portfolio combines ultra-low-power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks. Collectively, these three features make up the basic recipe for battery-powered mobile and IoT devices for extending their battery life from years to decades. Moreover, they reduce the number of times batteries need to be changed in a plethora of IoT applications.

Low Power Leap of Faith

Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontrollers have achieved a staggering 185.8 ULPBench score, which is way ahead of runner-up TI’s SimpleLink C26xx microcontroller family that scored 143.6. The SAM L21 microcontrollers consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode. According to Atmel spokesperson, it comes down to one-third the power of competing solutions.

Markus Levy, President and Founder of EEMBC, credits Atmel’s low-power feat to its proprietary picoPower technology and the company’s low-power expertise in utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring. Atmel’s picoPower technology employs flexible clocking options and short wake-up time with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes.

ULPBench aims to provide developers with a reliable methodology to test MCUs.

In other words, Atmel has taken the low-power game beyond architectural improvements to the CPU while optimizing nearly every peripheral to operate in standalone mode and then use a minimum number of transistors to complete the given task. Most lower-power ARM chips simply disable the clock to various parts of the device. The SAM L21 microcontroller, on the other hand, turns off power to those chip parts; hence, there is no leakage current in thousands of transistors in that part.

Here is a brief highlight of Atmel’s low-power development efforts that now encompass almost every peripheral in an MCU device:

Sleep Modes

Sleep modes not only gate away the clock signal to stop switching consumption, but also remove the power from sub-domains to fully eliminate leakage. Atmel also employs SRAM back-biasing to reduce leakage in sleep modes.

Consider a simple application where the temperature in a room is monitored using a temperature sensor with the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In order to reduce the power consumption, the CPU would be put to sleep and wake up periodically on interrupts from a real-time counter (RTC). The measured sensor data is checked against a predefined threshold to decide on further action. If the data does not exceed the threshold, the CPU will be put back to sleep waiting for the next RTC interrupt.

SleepWalking

SleepWalking is a technology that enables peripherals to request a clock when needed to wake-up from sleep modes and perform tasks without having to power up the CPU Flash and other support systems. For instance, Atmel’s ultra-low-power capacitive touch-sensing peripheral can run in all operating modes and supports wake-up on a touch.

For the temperature monitoring application, as mentioned above, this means that the ADC’s peripheral clock will only be running when the ADC is converting. When the ADC receives the overflow event from the RTC, it will request its generic clock from the generic clock controller and peripheral clock will stop as soon as the ADC conversion is completed.

Event System

The Event System allows peripherals to communicate directly without involving the CPU and thus enables peripherals to work together to solve complex tasks using minimal gates. It allows system developers to chain events in software and use an event to trigger a peripheral without CPU involvement.

Again, taking temperature monitor as a use case, the RTC must be set to generate an overflow event, which is routed to the ADC by configuring the Event System. The ADC must be configured to start a conversion when it receives an event. By using the Event System, an RTC overflow can trigger an ADC conversion without waking up the CPU. Moreover, the ADC can be configured to generate an interrupt if the threshold is exceeded, and the interrupt will wake up the CPU.

Low Power MCU Use Case

Paul Rako has mentioned a sensor monitor in his recent post in Atmel’s Bits & Pieces blog. Rako writes in his post titled “The SAM L21 pushes the boundaries of low power MCUs” about this sensor monitor being asleep 99.99 percent of the time, waking up once a day to take a measurement and send it wirelessly to a host. Such tasks can be conveniently handled by an 8-bit device.

However, moving to IoT applications, which constitute protocol stacks, there is number crunching involved and that requires a faster ARM-class 32-bit chip. So, for battery-powered IoT applications, Rako makes the case for 32-bit ARM-based chip that can wake up, do its thing, and go back to sleep. If a high-current chip wakes up 10 times faster but uses twice the power, it will still use less energy and less charge than the slower chip.

Next, Rako presents sensor fusion hub as a case study in which the device saves power by skipping the radio chip to send the data from each sensor and instead uses the ARM-based microcontroller that does the math and pre-processing to combine the raw data from all sensors and then assembles the result as a simple chunk of data.

Atmel has scored an important design victory in the ongoing low-power game that is now prevalent in the rapidly expanding IoT market. Atmel already boasts credentials in the connectivity and security domains — the other two key IoT building blocks. Its connectivity solutions cover multiple wireless arenas — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and 6LoWPan — to enable IoT communications.

Likewise, Atmel’s CryptoAuthentication devices come with protected hardware key storage and are available with SHA256, AES128 or ECC256/283 cryptography. The IoT triumvirate of low power consumption, broad connectivity portfolio and crypto engineering puts Atmel in a strong position in the promising new market of IoT that is increasingly demanding low power portfolio of MCUs to be matched with high performance.

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Majeed Ahmad is author of books Smartphone: Mobile Revolution at the Crossroads of Communications, Computing and Consumer Electronics and The Next Web of 50 Billion Devices: Mobile Internet’s Past, Present and Future.

Ars Technica, Daily Mail and other media talk SAM L21

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The new Atmel | SMART L21 is expanding battery life from years to decades. 

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This week, Atmel revealed the big news that the recently-unveiled Atmel | SMART SAM L family consumes just one-third the power of existing solutions already on the market. Having achieved a 185 EEMBC ULPBench score, the SAM L21 is now the world’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based device.

Impressively, the series boasts power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode. The SAM L not only broadens the company’s current 32-bit ARM-based MCU lineup, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, wearables, medical gadgets and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.

The SAM L21 MCUs will enable designers to solve their power challenges for battery-powered IoT devices — something that has caught the attention of mainstream media outlets including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, The Register, Network World and Daily Mail, as well as industry journals like Silicon Republic, New Electronics and EE Times.

 Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica 

“The number of things getting plugged into the Internet of Things has already reached the point of satire. But there’s a new, extremely low power technology that’s being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access into a whole new class of sensors, wearables, and practically disposable devices. That’s because it can run off a battery charge for over over 10 years.”

“The processor may not be enough to, say, run an Ubuntu desktop, but it’s certainly enough computing power and memory to run a real-time operating system with multiple programs, handle physical interfaces, stream media from a USB device or other external storage, and tweet you when your dishes are clean. It also can handle a lot of tasks that can reduce the power usage of other components in a device.”

Victoria Woollaston, Daily Mail 

“Battery life is consistently listed as a major flaw of smartphones, smartwatches and other wearables.  But this problem could soon be solved thanks to technology that promises to extend battery life for ‘decades.’ Atmel has released its latest microcontrollers (MCUs) for a variety of gadgets that are so low power they can even harvest energy from a person’s body.”

“They use a third of the power of rival chips and tests have shown they are the lowest power microprocessor ever made. The microcontrollers run on the firm’s picoPower technology and Atmel’s Event System that makes different parts of the device work together to carry out tasks. By effectively ‘sharing’ energy, the whole device uses less power and, subsequently, less battery.”

Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo

“As everything around us, from phones and fridges to bicycles and trash cans, begins to connect to the Internet, there’s an increasing desire for low-power chips. Like this one, which can last for over ten years on a single battery charge. It has some other clever tricks up its sleeve. Usually in a chip like this, sleep mode sees everything but the clock function shut down, meaning it has to wake every time connected devices need to communicate; this new Atmel chip has different sleep states, allowing connected devices to communicate with each other while the chip continues to use very little power.”

“Of course, the chips don’t pack huge amounts of grunt. In fact, at best you’re looking at a 42 MHz Cortex M0+ CPU core, 256 kilobytes of Flash memory, 32 kilobytes of static RAM, and 8 kb of separate low-power static RAM. Not enough to run a desktop OS, then, but plenty to run small programs, power hardware interfaces, read and record data from sensors, tweet and the like.”

JC Torres, SlashGear

“Batteries, already the Achilles heel of mobile devices, present an even bigger challenge for even smaller devices, like wearables and the budding Internet of Things industry. These latter devices are not things that you would, or should, associate with the frequent charging and battery replacement we are used to on smartphones. How do you balance performance and battery life? Atmel, a micro-controller manufacturer based in San Jose, may have the answer. Its new ultra-low power SAM L21 32-bit ARM-based MCU (micro controller unit) is advertised to last more than a decade before needing a recharge or replacement.”

“That kind of battery life will be critical for a certain class of devices that include sensors, wearable, and smart home appliances. The SAM L21 advertises a power draw of only 35 microamps per MHz when awake and an even smaller 200 nanoamps when asleep. In comparison, current low-power MCUs already eat up to 120 to 160 microamps per MHz. The difference it definitely substantial.”

Patrick Nelson, Network World

“The Internet of Things is about to reverse a lot of what we’ve wanted in a chip. Soon, we won’t need vast amounts of calculations per second — just how many instructions does it take for your fridge to send an order to your supermarket? Not that many when you compare it to something complicated that chip design has been working towards, like a Computer Aided Design drawing in 3D, for example.”

“Size is important. However, the real big issue, when it comes to a ubiquitous IoT where everything is connected, will be battery life. The reason is that we are not going to want to change the batteries within the base of a dozen bottles of water that we may have sitting around just to discover whether we’ve drank their contents or not. Even if your fridge orders fresh stock, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

“That battery has to last the life of the connected object in the IoT. And that could be 10 years away, possibly longer. Atmel reckons it has a solution. It says its new 32-bit ARM-based chips will last decades. Note the plural. Atmel says its new chips combine battery-saving low power with flash and SRAM that is big enough to run both the application and the IoT-needed wireless stacks.”

Shaun Nichols, The Register

“Being a Cortex-M0+-powered chip, the SAM L21 is not particularly powerful: it tops out at 48MHz, and runs ARM Thumb (and some Thumb-2) code. But the family does pack a few features like USB interfacing, op-amps and comparators, DMA with peripherals, a random number generator, and AES cryptography in hardware, plus other bits and pieces. The idea is for each chip to sleep, wake up when something happens, make a decision on whether or not it needs to alert the wider world, and then go back to sleep.

“Constantly being in contact with its base over wired or wireless networking will drain its batteries; activating external electronics for power-hungry IP communications should only be done if its sensors detect something significant. Like an explosion or a fire.”

Gordon Hunt, Silicon Republic

“Sensors and batteries – the two keys to unlocking the future of IoT. Can we make small enough sensors to garner and exchange the right data? Can we make small enough, powerful enough, batteries that don’t need recharging every few hours?These are the two questions posed for today’s inventors, and they are being answered every day. Now, Atmel’s latest creation may have brought significant IoT engagement closer to reality, with its new low-powered 32-bit SAM L controller able extend the battery life of small, low-powered intelligent devices by decades.”

“The result is a far more efficient, small controller that, if advanced upon in the right way, will open up a whole new swathe of devices for IoT innovation. It’s just a sample, prototype release so far, but once the right people get their hands on this it’s only a matter of time before it creeps into suites of low-powered devices.”

Rich Quinnell, EE Times

“This week TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+, a product announced last year that was scheduled to be released at about this time. It’s reasonable to expect that a formal announcement of the product’s score and availability will be made soon.”

Clive Maxfield, Embedded

“When it comes to applications including the Internet of Things (IoT), consumer, industrial, medical, and other battery-powered devices — e.g., fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and devices placed in rural, agriculture, offshore, and other remote areas — ultra-low-power consumption is the name of the game. MCU manufacturers are constantly competing with each other to offer the lowest power consumption possible. The latest ultra-low-power offering comes from the folks at Atmel, who have just announced their SMART SAM L21 — an ARM Cortex-M0+ based family of MCUs that boast power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode — which is said to ‘extend battery life from years to decades.’”

“The L21 goes much further than simply gating the clocks — it also gates the power, completely disconnecting the power rails from functions that are not currently in use. In the case of the smart peripherals, even when they are powered down, a small part of each peripheral keeps a ‘watchful eye’ on what’s happening in the outside world. If it sees something interesting, it can request clock and data services and — if the peripheral decides the situation justifies such an action — it can wake the main CPU… Also of interest is the CCL (custom configurable logic) block, which boasts four 3-input lookup tables (LUTs) that can implement a mix of combinatorial logic functions (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, NOT) and sequential logic functions (gates D-type flip-flop, JK-type flip-flop, gated D-type latch, RS latch). These can be connected to the event system (including the peripherals), the interrupt system, and general-purpose input/outputs; also, they can be cascaded together. This makes it possible to implement sophisticated customized “wake-up” conditions for the various functional blocks.”

Interested learning more? You can head over to our initial blog post on the topic, download its accompanying white paper, as well as delve deeper into the MCU lineup here.

SAM L family now the world’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based solution

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Consuming one-third the power of existing solutions, Atmel | SMART SAM L achieves 185 EEMBC ULPBench score.

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System design used to be an exercise in optimizing speed. That has since changed. Nowadays, embedded systems pack plenty of performance to handle a number of task, leading the challenge for designers to shift to completing those tasks using as little energy as possible — but not necessarily making it as fast as possible. As you can imagine, this has created quite the competitive environment on the processor battlefield amongst vendors, each seeking to attain the lowest power solution on the market.

“The surge in popularity of battery-powered electronics has made battery life a primary system-design consideration. In extreme cases, the desire is not to run off of a battery at all, but to harvest energy from local sources to run a system — which requires the utmost power frugality,” writes Andreas Eieland, Atmel Director of Product Marketing. “In addition, there’s a growing family of devices like smoke detectors, door locks, and industrial sensors (4-20 mA and 10-50 mA) that can draw power through their inputs, and that power is limited.”

These sort of trends point to the significance of reducing the power requirements of electronic systems. However, the varying technologies that provide the necessary performance make power reduction harder. Fortunately, Atmel has been focusing on low power consumption for more than 10 years across its portfolio of AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART ARM-based processors. Many integrated peripherals and design techniques are used to minimize power consumption in real-world applications, such as integrated hardware DMA and event system to offload the CPU in active and standby modes, switching off or reducing clock or supply on device portions not in use, intelligent SleepWalking peripherals enabling CPU to remain in deep sleep longer, fast wake-up from low power modes, low voltage operation with full functionality, as well as careful balancing of high performance and low leakage transistors in the MCU design.

With picoPower technology found in AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART MCUs, Atmel has taken it a step further. Indeed, all picoPower devices are designed from the ground up for lowest possible power consumption from transistor design and process geometry, sleep modes, flexible clocking options, to intelligent peripherals. Atmel picoPower devices can operate down to 1.62V while still maintaining all functionality, including analog functions. They have short wake-up times, with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes. Some elements of picoPower technology cannot be directly manipulated by the user, but they form a solid base that enables ultra-low power application development without compromising functionality. Meanwhile, flexible and powerful features and peripherals lets users apply an assortment of techniques to reduce a system’s total power consumption even further.

Then, there’s the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 microcontroller, which has broken all ultra-low power performance barriers to date. These Cortex-M0+-based MCUs can maintain system functionality, all while consuming just one-third the power of comparable products on the market today. This device delivers ultra-low power running down to 35µA/MHz in active mode, consuming less than 900nA with full 32kB RAM retention. With rapid wake-up times, Event System, Sleepwalking and the innovative picoPower peripherals, the SAM L21 is ideal for handheld and battery-operated devices for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The ultra-low power SAM L family not only broadens the Atmel | SMART portfolio, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most IoT applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.

So how does the SAM L21 stack up against the others? Ahead of the pack, of course! As an alternative to so-called “bench marketing” of low power products, nearly ever large semiconductor company — and several smaller ones that focus on low power — have collaborated in a working group formed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC). The EEMBC ULPBench uses standardized test measurement hardware to strictly define a benchmark code for use by vendors, considering energy efficiency and running on 8-, 16- and 32-bit architectures. At the moment, the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 product boasts the highest ULPBench score of any microcontroller, regardless of CPU.

“In Atmel’s announcement last year for the company’s SAM L21 family, I had pointed out the amazingly low current consumption ratings for both the active and sleep mode operation of this product family – now I can confirm this opinion with concrete data derived from the EEMBC ULPBench,” explained Markus Levy, EEMBC President and Founder. “Atmel achieved the lowest power of any Cortex-M based processor and MCU in the world because of its patented ultra-low power picoPower technology. These ULPBench results are remarkable, demonstrating the company’s low-power expertise utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring, as well as other innovative techniques.”

While running the EEMBC ULPBench, the SAM L21 achieves a staggering score of 185, the highest publicly-recorded score for any Cortex-M based processor or MCU in the world — and significantly higher than the 167 and 123 scores announced by other vendors. The SAM L21 family consumes less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.

In fact, a recent EE Times writeup delving deeper into competition even revealed, “TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+.”

Beyond the recently-unveiled ARM-based chip, it’s also important to note the 0.7V tinyAVR. A typical microcontroller requires at least 1.8V to operate, while the voltage of a single battery-cell typically ranges from 1.2V to 1.5V when fully charged, and then drops gradually below 1V during use, still holding a reasonable amount of charge. This means a regular MCU needs at least two battery cells. Whereas, Atmel has solved this problem by integrating a boost converter inside the ATtiny43U, converting a DC voltage to a higher level, and bridging the gap between minimum supply voltage of the MCU and the typical output voltages of a standard single cell battery. The boost converter provides the chip with a fixed supply voltage of 3.0V from a single battery cell even when the battery voltage drops down to 0.7V. This allows non-rechargeable batteries to be drained to the minimum, thereby extending the battery life. Programmable shut-off levels above the critical minimum voltage level avoid damaging the battery cell of rechargeable batteries.

Interested in learning more? You can explore Atmel’s low power technology here, as well as download the new white paper entitled “Turn Power-Reducing Features into Low-Power Systems” here.