This past August, Atmel had the opportunity to be an exhibiting sponsor at the Embedded System Conference in São Paulo, Brazil. Aside from showcasing our latest IoT solutions, Atmel | SMART product line and AVR microcontrollers, we were fortunate to also have time to interact with the vibrant Latin American embedded community.
Sander Arts, Atmel VP of Corporate Marketing, shared detailed insight into DIY culture, as well as the integral role Atmel plays in fueling the emerging embedded community. Additionally, Arts addressed the growth of the worldwide Maker Movement, showcasing a variety of startups (e.g. Pebble and MakerBot) who each got their start using versatile a range of Atmel 8- and 32-bit MCUs.
“There are over 217, in this particular moment, based and built around an Arduino (and AVR),” Arts revealed. “Specifically, there are over 160 AVR based projects on Kickstarter, of which 103 successful, collecting $7 million in funding.”
Arts went on to explore the newest addition to the Arduino family, the Arduino Zero — a simple, elegant and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform originally established by the popular ATmega328 based Uno.
Arts added that there are now over 1,000 Makerspaces and communities around the world, including a number of nearby Brazilian hackerspaces.
Shortly thereafter, the Atmel VP of Marketing had the chance to sit down with Garoa Hacker Clube’s Luciano Ramalho to further discuss the Maker Movement throughout the region, the company’s role in the DIY movement, embedded solutions and development environments, and of course, the budding popularity of Arduino.
During his Makers Club interview, Arts hinted at a couple of “additional developments around the Internet of Things for Makers,” which we now know was the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 — a shield which enables rapid prototyping of IoT applications using the highly-popular open-source platform.
Throughout the week, there was a tremendous amount of real buzz and excitement amongst the embedded engineers, developers and hobbyists in attendance. Caminhos de Sucesso Editor Jose Antonio Purcino caught up with Atmel Senior Product Marketing Andreas Eieland and EE Times’ Max Maxfield to explore the latest hot trends and topics in embedded design, IoT and wireless.
“The Internet of Things is nothing new, as we have been connecting MCUs to sensors and analyzing the data for a long time,” Andreas Eieland, Atmel Senior Product Marketing Manager, told EE Times. “But what is new is the technology options available for engineers to develop connected systems without the high degree of complexity of the past.”
We talk a lot about connecting, networking, and securing the Internet of Things, and the billions of devices spread across the globe. Another essential piece of the IoT puzzle is monitoring those devices, specifically with what we call presence.
Presence functionality gives IoT developers a way to monitor individual or groups of IoT devices in realtime. Whenever the state of the device changes, the change is reflected in realtime to a dashboard, with an alert, or any other way you want to display your tracking.
What Can Presence Monitor?
As soon as you start streaming large volumes of data, or signaling and trigger actions to devices, you need to know what devices are connected. So what kinds of device states can you monitor with presence functionality? Pretty much anything you want! With Presence functionality, you can build out custom device states including:
Online/offline status
Device health
Capacity for fleet management
Total device count in field
Battery/location status
Machine status (eg. currently working on X task, driver driving/offline)
Temperature and weather data from IoT sensors
With presence data, you can also log a history of device connectivity for audits and analytics. It’s not just about having realtime insight into your devices, but also tracking and logging performance, health, and other key metrics.
Why Is It Important?
Devices may get expensive: IoT devices can be expensive, so keeping tabs on your investment is essential. Device health presence monitoring gives you up to the millisecond health reports for device temperature, connectivity, battery life, etc, ensuring you that your device is 100% operational, all the time. And if any issues arise, you’ll know immediately that maintenance is required.
Devices may be imperative to operations/business: If IoT devices are at the core of business and operations, monitoring their health and status is paramount. Whether it’s agriculture readings, security sensors, or delivery fleet management, up to the millisecond device status can make or break a business.
Device Analytics: Accurate and up to date statistics and analytics is important to any IoT application or business. Presence functionality can store, retrieve, and playback collected analytics, for example, to give a history of device connectivity or health for audits.
Machine-to-Machine and IoT Use Cases for Presence
As we know, connected devices come in all shapes and sizes. And as IoT devices get smarter, more connected, more secure, and faster, they’re use in the field is skyrocketing across the globe. And as we add more devices into the field, realtime presence functionality is just as important as our device networks and IoT security.
Connected Car/Shipping & Freight: Smart cars are shifting IoT boundaries and constitutes a disruptive and transformative environment. Connected car represents a large number of IoT use cases for automobiles including taxi, fleet management, shipping and freight, and delivery service. Connected cars require a secure and reliable connection to counter the various roadblocks that arise in the wild, such as constantly changing cell and network towers and dropped connections.
For taxi, shipping, freight, and delivery management, custom presence functionality is a vital component of the business, providing realtime custom vehicle and device states, such as vehicle and cargo capacity, location data, and device health.
Home Automation: We’re well aware that our homes are getting smart. It seems today, every appliance has an IP address. It’s safe to say that the smart home market is prepared to take the world by storm. Especially for applications that enable users to control their homes remotely, presence functionality is essential. In the smart home, presence gives users a realtime view of their devices status (lights on, doors locked, water leak, thermostat, fridge temperature, etc). And that’s the basis of a solid home automation solution.
Presence on the PubNub Data Stream Network
PubNub Channel Presence is one of the core features of the PubNub Data Stream Network. It enables developers to add user and device detection to their web, mobile, and IoT applications, giving realtime instant detection and notification of user/device status. Built on the global PubNub Data Stream Network, no matter where the devices are located, you can get an accurate and reliable reading on any custom device state you want.
The good news about the recently-revealed BadUSB is that there actually is a cure: Atmel CryptoAuthentication. Hardware crypto engines were invented to protect software, firmware and hardware from exactly these types of attacks, among many others. These uber-tiny, ultra secure hardware devices can be easily and cost-effectively added to USB sticks (and other peripherals) by manufacturers, who are seeking to protect their customers by ensuring that only the proper and intended code is downloaded and used. Once installed into the peripherals, CryptoAuthentication devices will block the bad code. Period.
Let’s look at what Bad USB has uncovered: It is that everything with a processor is vulnerable to attack. Most people don’t really think of a USB stick, modern thermostat, home router, fax machine, PC mouse or trackpad, a camera, iPod, microwave, and other “things” as being computers; however, they are. In fact, they all have at least one processor, memory, ways to get stuff in and out, and code (firmware) that tells the processor what to do. That last piece is where the danger lies.
As any PC or smartphone user knows, code gets updated all the time to get rid of bugs and add features. Updating code opens up a processor that was previously running good code, to code altered by people with mal-intent, i.e. malware. This is how good embedded systems go bad. We recently saw malware that allowed an ATM to spit out 40 bank notes at a time if a certain code was entered. Real nice for those who know the code!
BadUSB is Bad for More Than Just USB
All systems with processors are vulnerable to bad code, which can do bad things to good systems. All it takes is a way to transfer bad code from one processor to another… and, that happens all the time. USB sticks, USB accessories, the Internet, wireless links like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth — you name it — can be vectors for diseased code. What BadUSB has revealed to us is that all embedded systems, unless equipped with robust protection mechanisms, are now vulnerable to catching diseased code. (Embola?)
Embola
One contracted, a machine infected with Embola can send private and sensitive information to bad guys, or let them take over your system for ransom or other mal-purposes. They can turn on cameras and microphones to spy, grab your photos and bank account information, or even mess with your car. Whatever they want they can have, and you most likely will never know it.
By now you should see the point, which is that every embedded system and PC needs protection. Everything that runs software is vulnerable such as wearables, phones, USB accessories, USB sticks, cameras, cars, printers, thermostats, ATMs, meters, microwaves, appliances, and whatever the IoT will become. Simply put: If it has a processor and connects to something else, it is hackable.
So, what can you do to protect against Embola? The answer is twofold:
1. Don’t let the bad code in, and
2. If it does get in, don’t let it run.
While this sounds pedantically simplistic, these steps are NOT being taken. These two functions have the self-explanatory names of secure download and secure boot.
Secure Download
Secure download uses encryption to ensure that the code that is received by the embedded system is kept away from hackers. The code is encrypted using an algorithm such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by using an encryption key. That encryption key is created using a secret that is only shared with the target system. The encrypted code is sent to the target embedded system to be decrypted and loaded for its use. Along with the encrypted code, a seed is also sent to the target system.
The seed is a number (typically unique with each session) that is hashed during the encryption session with a secure secret key. The result of that hashing is called the digest or Message Authentication Code (MAC) and it is used to encrypt the code (i.e. the MAC is the actual encryption key). The seed is sent to the target system to enable decryption, and not useful to anyone unless it is hashed with the secret key, which is what the target system will do. The target system runs the same hashing algorithm with the identical shared secret key stored there and the seed, which results in the same digest (MAC) that was used to encrypt the code. That MAC can now be used as the decryption key to decrypt the code. At this point, the decrypted code can be ran in the target embedded system.
However, there is another step that can be taken that adds even more security, which is authentication using a digital signature. To use authentication, the unencrypted original code is hashed and signed by the code originator at the same time as the original encryption process. The originator uses a signing key on that hash of the code to make a signature. That signature is sent with the encrypted code and seed to the target system. Once the encrypted code is decrypted using the process noted above, the newly decrypted code will be hashed by the target system, just like was done by the originator, and then signed with the signing key stored in the target system. That signing key is the same as on the originator’s signing module, so if the decrypted code has not been altered, the signature made on the digest of that decrypted code and the signing key will be exactly the same as the signature that was sent over. These two signatures are compared and if they match then the code has been authenticated and can be safely run on the target system. What does this mean? No risk of Embola!
The two levels or security provided by secure down load with authentication is obviously very robust. It will ensure that code that was received has been kept secret during transmission and has not been tampered.
Secure Boot
Secure boot also uses digital signatures to ensure that the code to be booted when the target system starts up matches the code that the manufacturer intended and has not been tampered with. It sort of works in a similar way as secure download. If the code to be booted has been altered, then the signature made by hashing the digest of that code with a secret signing key will not match the signature from the manufacturer. If they don’t match, the code will not load.
After being named one of the early lead licensees of the processor, we announced a new family of Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M7-based MCUs, which are well positioned between our existing ARM Cortex-M-based MCUs and Cortex-A-based MPUs. The new devices will address high-growth markets including the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables, as well as automotive and industrial applications that require both high performance and power efficiency.
During ARM TechCon 2014, Atmel’s Pat Sullivan had the chance to catch up with Dominic Pajak of ARM to discuss the company’s newly-introduced Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M7-based processor.
“We are proud to be a lead partner in the Cortex-M7 product. We think it’s a great device and really like the performance of it. It actually sits really well between the M4 and A5/A7 portfolios, ” Sullivan told Pajak. “I see this as a really nice filler for us. It allows our customers working in both areas to have a bridge product and a really nice roadmap moving forward.”
As to which IoT segments the Atmel Cortex-M7 processors will be used, “We see it in mid-range wearable applications, as well as healthcare devices in that area,” Sullivan notes.
Shortly thereafter, Sullivan joined fellow industry heavyweights (ST Micro and Freescale) for a standing-room only panel on the microcontroller. During the session, Sullivan said he sees the Cortex-M7 also succeeding in networking and gateway arenas.
“We see it addressing a lot of the system integration, performance issues, and power issues that we have. We also see it working in networking, Internet of Things and smart energy. We think this particular core is well suited for the areas where we see the highest growth rate.”
“Consistent architecture with high-performance is one of the most important things we see in ARM Cortex-M7.” He later added, “Huge data is driving a connected home and it’s coming sooner than we think.”
Sullivan concluded, “We’re all going to be in a more connected world in the future, good and bad. We may not even recognize it.”
While sampling to select customers is currently underway, general availability of the Xplained kit is expected in early 2015. Stay tuned!
The WINC1500 is an ideal add-on to existing MCU solutions bringing Wi-Fi and network capabilities through UART or SPI-to-WiFi interface, and connects to any Atmel AVR or Atmel | SMART MCU with minimal resource requirements. As a result, the SoC enables Makers and engineers to bring connectivity to any embedded design, ranging from consumer to industrial apps.
As Hackaday’s Adam Fabio recently noted, “The WINC1500 is a nifty little Wi-Fi module in its own right… 72Mbps may not sound like much by today’s standards, but it’s plenty fast for most embedded applications. WINC handles all the heavy lifting of the wireless connection.”
The WINC1500’s most advanced mode is a single stream 1×1 802.11n mode providing up to 72 Mbps PHY throughput, and features a fully-integrated power amplifier, LNA, switch and power management. The solution provides internal Flash memory as well as multiple peripheral interfaces including UART, SPI, and I2C. The only external clock source required for the SoC is a high-speed crystal or oscillator with a wide variety of reference clock frequencies supported (between 12 – 32 MHz). The WINC1500 is also available in a QFN package.
During ARM TechCon 2014, our friends at ARM had the chance to catch up with Henrik Flodell, Atmel Senior Product Marketing Manager, who highlighted a few demos that combined ARM-based Cortex-M0+ MCUs with the Atmel WINC1500 module.
First, Flodell showed off the SAM D21 Xplained Pro Kit, combined with a WINC1500 and motion sensor. As the video below demonstrates, the board was capable of wirelessly transmitting its coordinates to the application running on the screen.
“For the professional that wants to use the Atmel development tools or those from third party vendors, we have the Xplained Pro Solution.” However, Flodell went on to address the DIY crowd seeking to use 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ based MCUs stating, “We’ve also realized there’s a huge interest in the Maker community for creating connected devices based on ARM technology.”
This cost-effective, secure shield is an easy-to-use extension that can seamlessly be connected to any Arduino board enabling high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity. The Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 is powered by Atmel’s wireless network controller, part of the Atmel SmartConnect family. It also includes the ATECC108 device, from the CryptoAuthentication family, which allows users to easily incorporate hardware authentication capability in their design.
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a publish/subscribe messaging protocol for constrained, low-powered embedded Internet of Things devices. Think of it as the M2M (machine-to-machine) messaging protocol for low-bandwidth, high-latency, and unreliable network environments. This gives IoT developers a solid communication option when specifically working with embedded devices, which are expected to perform in “the wild,” while still needing to remain small, light, and have a high performance battery life.
Design and History Behind MQTT
MQTT was first developed in 1999, but has seen a massive explosion in growth and adoption with the surge of the Internet of Things. We now need a way to communicate, signal, and connect between low powered smart devices, and that’s where MQTT comes in. Built as a low-overhead protocol with strong considerations towards bandwidth and CPU limitations, MQTT has found its place in the embedded environment.
In terms of design, MQTT is a publish/subscribe M2M protocol for embedded devices. It enables clients to connect as a publisher, subscriber, or both, and connect to a broker that handles message passing. There is plenty of documentation and open source client implementations if you wish to dive further into the protocol itself.
The Core of MQTT is the Topic
The ‘topic’ is at the core of using MQTT as an M2M communication avenue for embedded devices. It’s a simple idea, and it’s not unique to MQTT. However, the MQTT protocol harnesses the ‘topic’ fairly well. The ‘topic’ does several things, it’s most important being to ensure that a message is delivered to the correct subscribers. MQTT treats the ‘topic’ as a file path. Overall, think of the ‘topic’ as a simple communication filter, which makes the path application very powerful.
topic = "user/path/topic"
You could be interested in a particular higher level of the path or the leaf element. Without explicitly saying so, MQTT filters messages based on where you subscribe in the tree path. A simple idea, that can be used very effectively.
Technical Specifications of MQTT
Looking a little deeper into the technical aspects of MQTT, the M2M protocol runs on the top of a TCP/IP networking stack. When a client connects for publish/subscribe, MQTT begins the handshaking process. The MQTT header is two bytes, and the first byte is constant. In the first byte, you specify the type of message being sent, as well as the QoS level, retain, and DUP flags. The second byte is the remaining length field. There is more information you can glean from the MQTT specification if you are interested.
Building MQTT on a Data Stream Network
With PubNub now supporting MQTT over our realtime, global data stream network, we wanted to give an overview of the protocol and why you might or might not use it from our perspective. We just went through some of the inner workings, features, and the value the protocol. We’ll now take a look at why you might want to use MQTT with PubNub, or PubNub native exclusively.
To utilize PubNub, our gateway is mqtt.pubnub.com and we’ll handle all the broker services and provide you access to our network. First, you publish to a topic (at PubNub we call them channels). Anyone who is subscribed to that topic will receive the message that was published.
You may be wondering what the advantage is of using PubNub Native over MQTT?
from Pubnub import Pubnub
def callback(message, channel):
print(message, channel)
pubnub = Pubnub('demo', 'demo')
pubnub.subscribe('my_channel', callback=callback)
- See more at: http://www.pubnub.com/blog/what-is-mqtt-use-cases/#sthash.Fm9tmkN5.dpuf
MQTT targets low-powered embedded device environments where resources are scarce. PubNub solves the problems of large-scale connectivity for realtime apps and IoT devices. If you’ve already deployed MQTT-based infrastructure, it makes sense to take advantage of this new PubNub gateway to facilitate scaling and maintenance of your embedded device connectivity layer.
If MQTT is not part of your current infrastructure, you might consider leveraging the PubNub Realtime Data Stream Network directly along with PubNub’s numerous IoT SDKs for all of your Internet of Things connectivity. To start, we provide over 50 client SDKs to use, extensive PubNub documentation and our blog where we showcase useful tutorials with open source code, demos, and other write ups on all things realtime technology.
MQTT does have many open source client implementations and documentation, and is a great publish/subscribe messaging protocol for low-powered devices. The protocol has a small footprint and has some great MQTT use cases.
There are several Arduino-MQTT implementations and resources available today, and the two go hand in hand for developers working on embedded device projects. As a user, if you are looking for a very small publish/subscribe protocol, MQTT may be for you. If you need more features, or need to scale to hundreds or thousands of connected devices, that’s where PubNub comes in. The transition from MQTT to PubNub in both code and ideology is a quick, exciting process.
In the fifth video of the series, I asked the co-inventor of the AVR microcontroller about the progression of the peripherals in the various microcontrollers Atmel offers. Vegard shares that when they invented the first AVR products, the team was concerned with ease-of-use, a clean instruction set that would run C, instructions that ran in a single cycle, and good quality tools.
However, he was just as proud of the peripherals that they then developed for the XMEGA line of AVR 8-bit chips. There, he said the stress was still on low power, but also a set of peripherals that were high performance, robust, strong, effective, and that included analog and digital advanced peripherals. Additionally, Vegard stressed how the XMEGA event system would allow programmers to handle complex events and take action, all without waking up the CPU core in the part.
Vegard Wollan becomes animated when talking about the peripherals in AVR and ARM chips offered by Atmel.
I knew this was cool for the low-power aspect, yet Vegard reminded me that it also allows you to service an interrupt faster and more deterministically — always a good thing in embedded systems. The great news for engineers is that all the cool things Atmel figured out for the XMEGA AVR also went into to the UC3, the 32-bit AVR product lines. Then, we made sure to put these same powerful and flexible peripheral systems into our ARM core-based MCUs. In addition we would add dedicated touch I/O pins and more accurate clocks and references. You can still see the AVR DNA from back in 1990 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology where the AVR came to life.
What I really loved about Vegard was his humility. Every time I tried to give him credit for the AVR he was sure to remind me that there was a whole team that developed it. And, when I tried to point that the AVR was RISC (reduced instruction set computer) before ARM came out, he told me that he was more proud of the peripherals in all of Atmel’s chips, rather than just the core he invented for the AVR. That’s a good thing to keep in mind.
While using any ARM core will get you the instruction set and header files and open-source tools, Atmel’s ARM chips will also get these great peripherals and the event system to tie them all together, while the CPU sleeps peacefully. A recent article helped me understand Vegard’s Norwegian modesty, but I am sure glad he and his team worked on the AVR and ARM chips.
Electronic DesignTechnology Editor Bill Wong recently had the chance to catch up with Patrick Hanley, Atmel Product Marketing Manager for Touch Technology, to talk about recent market trends as well as the company’s latest offerings. The interview, which was published on September 26, 2014, can be found below.
Hanley: Atmel focuses on industrial, consumer, communications, computing, and automotive markets. We provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions by leveraging one of the industry’s broadest IP technology portfolios.
Wong: The world of touch-enabled devices is skyrocketing; from the proliferation of smartphones to tablets, almost everyone wants to tap a screen even if it’s not touch-enabled. What do you think has led to the widespread adoption?
Hanley: With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the general consumer market became more comfortable and aware of capacitive touch-enabled products to infiltrate our lives. For years prior, the idea of a capacitive touch was an unfamiliar concept that consumers were less comfortable with.
Today most individuals approach all displays with the assumption it is touch-enabled. The world of touch can be seen in a vast range of formats and devices, at its most basic levels in buttons, sliders, and wheels, to more advanced touchscreens that provide multiple, true X/Y coordinates. These touch devices also reach a multitude of applications. From GPS systems to wearables to all-in-one PCs, there is a place for touch in all of these devices.
Hanley: The mXT106xT family is a continuation of our T-series family of products. It is aimed at the largest growth touchscreen market, screens between 7 to 8.9-inches. We introduced adaptive sensing, which is a hybrid of mutual- and self-capacitance. This enables the best glove, finger hover sensing and stylus support available, even in the presence of moisture. Adaptive sensing is crucial, as it enables touch classification where the touch controller is able to determine the difference between a single finger, multi-touch, glove, hover, and stylus, and reacts to the user appropriately.
We unveiled several new features including the peripheral touch controller (PTC), the first touch controller that enables capacitive button capabilities within the same controller without compromising any additional x/y-lines. The PTC improves noise immunity, eliminates external components, and simplifies the sensor design. Additional features include voltage triplers and non-HDI (high-density interconnect) packages. The voltage tripler reduces external BOM components, saving the customer space and cost. The non-HDI package enables customers to reduce PCB layers, further reducing costs.
Wong: Sounds interesting. So, we all know device features are everything, starting from the initial touch performance carrying through to everything else that influences the UI. How is Atmel aiming to continue improving these features?
Hanley: The user interface can make or break the success of a product. An intuitive, yet attractive, UI can create demand for products where customers “have to have” these new products. This is the easiest way for an OEM to differentiate their end product.
Improving stylus performance is vital for a variety of applications and vertical markets. Active stylus support is becoming a must-have for higher-end tablets, which are typically identified for professional or artistic uses. Alternatively, passive stylus support is geared toward free-writing capabilities for general users as well as everyday uses. Passive stylus support carries universal stylus capabilities, even as standard as a no. 2 pencil, ultimately revolutionizing the “pen-to-paper” experience.
Atmel also offers features like hover support. We continuously improve range and accuracy while decreasing manufacturing costs through the flexibility of new materials, as well as enable immersive features like advanced gesturing. Features such as hover empower our devices to be able to think beyond the surface, creating the next wave of smart, intuitive products.
Wong: I also see that Atmel’s maXStylus was announced earlier this year at CES. How is this transforming the “pen-to-paper” experience?
Hanley: Historically, to achieve high performance with active stylus solutions, OEMs were spending upwards of $30, adding more inductive layers to the sensor stack-up. The maXStylus is the first capacitive active stylus to provide accurate active-pen performance without an additional sensor layer. This reduces the costs for tablets, laptops, and smartphones while maintaining excellent performance. The result for the user is fewer missing strokes, false detections, longer pen hover range, and more accurate and readable letters and characters. You can even go from using the stylus to your fingers without compromising performance or battery life.
Wong: What upcoming trends and user-interface technologies are you most excited about?
Hanley: Fingerprint security is exciting. It enables improved security with ease-of-use capabilities and more. 3D gesturing is another interesting and popular technology. As seen in the film Minority Report, technologies such as 3D gesturing and motion control allow users to interact with their devices without touching it. It gives you freedom both mentally and physically.
Additionally, Atmel is the leader in sensor hubs, which enable sensor fusion. Sensor fusion leads to more accurate readings of the movements, locations, temperatures, etc., of an object, all while increasing the battery life of the product despite the always-on capabilities.
At Atmel, we believe that these technologies are allowing OEMs and developers to create best-in-class products that let industry leaders create what they have always imagined.
Wong: Atmel recently announced the latest in touch with the introduction of the mXT106xT family. Can you elaborate?
While it may seem like every morning and the hours thereafter are coffee day, today is indeed National Coffee Day.Let’s face it, engineers, students and Makers alike all enjoy a good cup ‘o joe, or two, or three. Whether it’s a home brewed pot or a skinny frappa-thingy at a nearby coffee shop, the beverage has certainly become the unofficial technology behind engineers for years.
To commemorate the day, we’ve compiled ten of our favorite caffeine-inspired designs that will certainly perk you up…
5. Over the past year, Starbucks has doubled the number of its Clover coffee-brewing machines, which connect to the cloud and track customer preferences, enable recipes to be digitally updated, assist baristas remotely monitor a coffee maker’s performance, and allow connected fridges to alert staff when a carton of milk has spoiled.
7. IoT… Internet of Tables? Developed at the MIT Media Lab, the Facebook Coffee Table listens to your conversations and displays photos from your Facebook page whenever they are appropriate to the conversation.
8. Nescafé recently debuted a 3D-printed Alarm Cap, which awakens caffeine enthusiasts with the sweet sounds of nature. In order to switch off the alarm, the user opens the lid and is greeted with the invigorating smell of Nescafé coffee. This eye-opening (literally) design was created with Shapeways 3D printing technology and [Atmel based] Arduino electronics.
9. Back in 2013, our neighbors at Qualcomm introduced the world’s first-ever Wi-Fi connected coffee machine, which not only was controlled using a tablet but alerted users when their brew was ready.
10. Paulig Muki is using e-ink to put your mug on your coffee mug. The smart cup shows a new image — which can be uploaded via mobil app — each time you fill it with a hot liquid.
And of course, what would a morning be without your traditional, personal coffee maker? From a number of popular home brewers to other smart devices in and around the house, Atmel AVR and Atmel | SMART microcontrollers are powering them all with a variety of low-end, mid-range and high-end solutions.
So without further ado, we wish each and every one of you a happy National Coffee Day! After all, there is an ‘EE’ in coffee for a reason!
Vegard touches on the availability of AVR chips in DIP (dual in-line) packages. These larger packages are loved by Makers and hobbyists since they are easy to prototype with. You can solder to the pins without a microscope and it is easy to make changes. They are also well-suited to installing in sockets, so you can replace them, or yank them out and program them in a separate programmer board.
Atmel still makes parts in the older DIP package, loved by hobbyists and Makers alike.
In the interview, Vegard refers to the ball grid array, commonly referred to as BGA by us acronym-loving tech people. BGAs are extremely small, just a little bigger than the silicon die itself. They also tend to transfer heat out of the die effectively, but that is rarely a factor in AVR chips since they are so low power. The headache with BGA chips is that you need an IR reflow oven to solder them on a board. Now, my buddy Wayne Yamaguchi has figured out a toaster oven will get the job done, just don’t toast any bread in it after you put a lead-soldered board into it.
Atmel parts in BGA packages are very small, but take special inspection and rework equipment.
The real headaches with BGA packages are rework and inspection. To replace the chip, you would need a camera mounted hot-air rework station from Metal/OKI; in order to make sure it is soldered correctly would require an X-ray machine (no, I am not kidding) to see that all the balls have sweated onto the pads under the chip. It helps to use gold-immersion finished circuit boards since they tend to be flatter than HASL (hot air solder-leveled) boards. However, if you are making some leading-edge tiny consumer product, all these prototyping and QC hassles are well worth it to get the smallest size possible.
To remove and resolder a BGA on your circuit board, you need to use a high-dollar camera equipped hot-air station like the Metcal Scorpion from Oki.
Vegard confirmed that Atmel uses the AVR 32-bit UC3 core in our touch controllers and mouse controller products. As you will see in the video above, we then went on to discuss Atmel’s legacy of providing really inexpensive demo boards and development tools.
Vegard Wollan smiles with pride as I show him an old demo board I used in 1999.
I also dragged out the actual AVR ICE 200 in-circuit emulator (ICE) I used in 1998, to design a point-of-sale terminal (note I misspeak in the video, calling it an STK200). The remarkable thing was this system would emulate an AVR chip in-circuit, and it only cost 200 dollars, back in an era when Intel Blue-Box 8051 systems were 50 grand.
Vegard Wollan really beams as I describe the 200-dollar Atmel AVR ICE 200, that got my startup off to a fast start in 2001.
