Wireless Composer in Atmel Studio 6

By: Magnus Perdersen

Wireless Composer in Atmel Studio 6

The Wireless Composer allows you to easily and seamlessly evaluate and test RF systems at an early stage of development. Wireless Composer simplifies the design process by tying together the tools required to edit the code in Atmel Studio, evaluate and test the RF system.

Wireless Composer is fully integrated into Atmel Studio 6.1 as an extension, and consists of:

1. Wireless Library – Contains Atmel Software Framework (ASF) compliant Wireless example Performance Test projects to evaluate designs using various Atmel devices and transceivers. A set of precompiled projects are also available as a separate download in Wireless Library hex.
2. Performance Analyzer – A tool used to evaluate and configure Low Power RF Transceivers and wireless microcontrollers from Atmel.

The Wireless Library contains ASF compliant Wireless example projects. The Performance Analyzer application is available for the following kits:

• ATREB212BSMA-EK
• ATREB231ED-EK
• ATREB231FE2-EK
• ATREB232ED-EK
• ATREB233SMAD-EK
• ATRF4CE-EK
• ATmega256RFR2-EK
• ATmega256RFR2-XPRO

Atmel wireless evaluation and development kits are available for purchase from the Atmel Store.

The Performance Analyzer is a useful tool to help Measure and Analyze the RF performance characteristics of the supported Atmel 802.15.4 wireless platforms.

This tool provides the user with the capability to perform Energy Scans across standard 802.15.4 RF channels to create a visual representation of the RF energy surrounding the location of the radio platform, connected to the Performance Analyzer. Once you have selected a relatively quiet RF channel to use in further RF measurements, you will then find other helpful features contained within the Analyzer. The PER (packet error test) is one such example. This test allows one to collect numerical information regarding the quality of the RF link between two paired nodes.

Parameters such as LQI, RSSI, Packet Error Rate and Throughput can be examined and recorded. This information can also be used to create numerical information regarding Range capabilities between the two paired RF nodes. When it’s time to analyze RF transmissions, TX output power, RX sensitivity or power consumption, the Performance Analyzer provides many functions that allow configuration of the radio registers. Register access allows controlling the current operational state of the RF device, all without writing any additional C code, or developing additional test firmware to configure the device for these measurements.

Intelligent MCUs for Low Power Designs

By Florence Chao, Senior Field Marketing Manager, MCU Business Development

Industrial and consumer devices using ARM® Cortex®-M4

Blood glucose meters, sport watches, game controllers and accessories, guess what they all have in common. Yes, like a lot of other industrial and consumer devices, they run on batteries and demand long or extended battery life. As an engineer, this translates into a key challenge when designing an embedded computing system. You need a central heart—in this case a microcontroller—that consumes as little power as possible in both active and static modes yet doesn’t sacrifice performance.  The Atmel® SAM4L ARM® Cortex®-M4 based series is designed with this in mind.

The SAM4L microcontroller redefines low power, delivering the lowest power consumption in its class in active mode (90uZ/MHz) as well as in static mode with full RAM retention running. It also delivers the shortest wake-up time (1.5us). At the same time, this is the most efficient microcontroller available today, achieving up to 28 CoreMark/mA.

The SAM4L series integrates Atmel’s proprietary picoPower® technology

The SAM4L series integrates Atmel’s proprietary picoPower® technology, which ensures the devices are developed from the ground up—from transistor design to clocking options—to consume as little power as possible. In addition, Atmel Sleepwalking technology allows the peripherals to make intelligent decisions and wake up the system upon qualifying events at the peripheral level.

In this video, you will see how the SAM4L microcontroller supports multiple power configurations to allow the engineer to optimize its power consumption in different use cases. You will also see another good feature of the SAM4L series, Power Scaling, which is a technique to adjust the internal regulator output voltage to further reduce power consumption provided by the integrated Backup Power Manager Module. In addition, the SAM4L series comes with two regulator options to supply system power based on the application requirement. While the buck/switching regulator delivers much higher efficiency and is operational from 2 to 3.6V. The linear regulator has higher noise immunity and operates from 1.68 to 3.6V.

The Atmel® SAM4L ARM® Cortex®-M4 based Microcontroller

It’s all about system intelligence and conserving energy. Simply put, the SAM4L microcontroller is your choice if you are designing a product that requires long battery life but you don’t want to sacrifice performance.  To get started, learn more about Atmel SAM4L Xplained Pro Evaluation and Starter Kits.

Why Choose Sub1GHz RF Solution?? It’s All About The Physics

Wireless communication is becoming an important part of our everyday life. Design engineers need to be mindful of have multiple design parameters when designing products for wireless applications. One of the parameters that need careful evaluation is the frequency band to be used for the wireless application.

In the world of ultra low power wireless devices compliant to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, the number of bands to choose from are relatively low – it’s basically a choice between the 2.4GHz ISM band available worldwide, or the regional Sub1Ghz frequency bands at 700/800/900MHz.

Looking at the characterstics of the Sub1GHz vs 2.4GHz designs, ahcieving maximum range, yet keeping the power consumption to the ultimate minimum – it’s pretty much all about the physics.

At lower frequencies it takes less power to achieve the same range as higher frequencies. Free space path loss (FSPL) is given by the formula:

FSPL (dB) = 20 log₁₀ (d) + 20 log₁₀ (f) + 32.44

Where:
            d is the distance of the receiver from the transmitter (km)
             f is the signal frequency (MHz)

The result shown in the table below comparing two IEEE 802.15.4 compliant transceivers, operated at the same conditions, one at 2.4GHz and one at 915MHz shows a range benefit of ~2.6x for the Sub1GHz system.

In addition to the superior range given by the law of physics, Sub1Ghz also penetrate concrete, walls and humid environment much more effieciently. In some regions you will also experience a less crowded environment, not subject to interference from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other consumer devices operating in the 2.4GHz frequency band.

Atmels® AT86RF212B Ultra Low power Sub1GHz RF transceiver has been designed for wireless products compliant to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It is a direct sequence spread spectrum RF transceiver, supporting various datarates from 20kb/s to 1000kb/s. Power consumption is as low as 0.2uA in sleep, 9.2mA and 18mA in receive and transmit, respectively. Maximum RF output power is +10dBm, while the receiver is able to receive signals down to -110dBm.

The AT86RF212B is designed to meet the tough requirements of systems in harsh environments, demanding years of maintenance free operation from a single battery cell. Example uses such as gas- and water-meters, ligthing control, environemental monitoring and other proprietary systems up to 1000kb/s.

If you are interested in experiencing the benefits of this ultra low power Sub1GHz RF transceiver, please visit store.atmel.com to purchase your AT86RF212B Evaluation Kit today. We’ll follow up with tips/tricks on how to evaluate the AT86RF212B using the Wireless Composer in Atmel Studio 6.   Stay tuned!!!

Weighing the Benefits of Hardware- vs. Software-only Security

By: Steve Jarmusz

I have seen many software programs touting that they have security built into the code.  I don’t think having the algorithm in software is such a bad thing, but having the keys or roots of trust stored in a non-secure, external Flash device or internal non-volatile memory within the MCU is.    I think it leaves the system vulnerable to attacks.  I have learned that software-based security schemes often use the hardware accelerators that are in a MCU or they implement them in software.  We have seen hack shops in Asia that will extract the keys from a binary file for a nominal fee, so that is not secure.  Even if the engineers bought a microcontroller that has crypto accelerators inside, normally the hardware accelerators inside the MCU are not protected from tampering.    In contrast, hardware-based security schemes use a device that has been created specifically to address a particular security need.  Hardware devices usually have secure key storage so that the key cannot be read from the outside nor changed.  The algorithms used by these devices are developed in hardware in a way that is secure and tamper resistant.  Hardware devices usually have built-in protection mechanisms in case they are being attacked either environmentally or physically.  So in your next design, I highly recommend that you spend a little time to research hardware security.

2012 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog, which was launched in November 2012.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 14,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 3 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Powering Down 32-Bit MCUs

32-bit microcontrollers are getting designed into pretty much every electronic product. Until recently they were used primarily in industrial and automotive applications, but with improved architectures leading to significantly lower power consumption, MCUs are now being adopted in a broad range of portable and battery-powered applications. The folks at Atmel have introduced a new, ultra low power family of ARM® Cortex™-M4 processor-based MCUs that consume just one-third the power of currently available solutions. Various sleep modes that enable the MCU to shut down unused modules along with software-controlled clock gating are used to tailor the power consumption based on the application’s requirement. In addition, unused peripherals can also be fully shut down individually and enabled again during runtime, further lowering power consumption without compromising system operation. Learn more about SAM4L devices.

Monitor Hurricanes with Arduino Platform

When Mother Nature roars in the form of hurricanes, like the recent Hurricane Sandy on the U.S.’s East Coast, social media sites like Twitter demonstrate how critical it is to be able to easily share information. With the Arduino platform, you can create a DIY auto-Tweeting weather station. See photos and learn how here.

How Touchscreens Have Evolved….and Where They Are Heading

Interesting piece from Mashable about the history of touchscreens. For sure, touchscreens are part of our everyday lives now. Toddlers are growing up adept at using their fingertips to apply commands.

How do you think touchscreens will continue to evolve?

Inside Microsoft Surface Tablet

The folks at iFixit have taken a good look inside Microsoft’s new Windows RT-based Surface tablet. Of course, we’re happy that the tablet contains four of our maXTouch touchscreen controllers inside, three mXT154E devices and a mXT1386 device. It’ll be interesting to see how widely adopted the Surface might be in the workplace. We played with one recently, and found it very easy to type on the keyboard that’s integrated into the tablet cover. And, of course, there’s access to a version of Microsoft Office and other productivity apps.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Teardown/11275/1

Marrying Touch and Sensor Hub

Do you design gaming or navigation apps, or any apps that rely on motion-related data? We’ve just announced a new single-chip solution that integrates touch and sensor hub functionality. It processes data from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers in real time, so you can create an even better user experience. Learn more: http://www.atmel.com/Microsite/maxtouch_sseries/sensorhub.aspx?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Social%2BMedia&utm_campaign=Sensor%2BHub