1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg (Part 1)

1:1 Interview conducted by Atmel’s Tom Vu with Rob van Kranenburg, IoT-A Stakeholder Coordinator, Founder of Council, and Adviser to Open Source Internet of Things, osiot.org.

TV: Why IoT-A? There are a multitude of IoT consortiums important to forging the progress of this next era of connective technology. Why is it important to the general business and mainstream? Why so many consortiums? Will it eventually roll up to one?

RvK: In systemic shifts the next normal is at stake. Of course you have to believe that IoT is a systemic shift first. Paradoxically, it is precisely the fact that we see so many contenders and consortia – no one wants to miss out or be left behind – that IoT is moving from being a vision to a business proposition. The success of the device as a standard – the Steve Jobs approach to controlling hardware, software, connectivity, app store; what goes in and what goes out and who it is friends with – has been an eye opener.

Patrick Moorhead writes in his Forbes piece that “the stunning success of smartphones, followed by similar success for tablets, has pushed the standardization opportunities for next generation infrastructure into play for the top tier of visionary companies”¹, listing among others IBM Smarter Planet, Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, Google, IPSO Alliance, ARM, International M2M Council, IoT-A (Internet-of-Things Architecture), and Intel’s Intelligent Systems Framework (ISF).  Software as a service, could only come into existence with the Cloud: “In the 90s, storage disks of less than 30GB capacity were incredibly expensive. Today, thanks to innovations in silicon technology, we are able to get high capacity storage disks at a nominal cost.”² In the early 2000s we see the first experiments with real-time feedback.

In an earlier post you mention Formula 1. In 2002 Wired published a piece on sailing and the America’s Cup: “We’re trying to find patterns, to see that one set of conditions tends to result in something else. We don’t know why, and we don’t need to, because the answer is in the data.” This a programmer talking, a programmer and a sailor: Katori is writing a program that crunches the measurements and creates a “wind profile number an implied wind,” a wind an implied boat can sail on, as sailing, so long an intuitive art, has become a contest of technology: “Sensors and strain gauges are tracking 200 different parameters every second and sending the information across Craig McCraws OneWorld’s LAN to its chase boats and offices. Then the info gets dumped into a Microsoft SQL database, where it’s sifted to pinpoint the effects of sail and hardware experiments. Unraveling all the input is, in the words of OneWorld engineer Richard Karn, “nearly impossible.” And that’s not all: every day for the past two years, five OneWorld weather boats have headed out into the Gulf to harvest data.”³

I remember how struck I was by that notion of an “implied wind.” Before that notion there was the “real” and the “digital,” two concrete and separate worlds. You could argue that prior to that there was the “real” and the “surreal” or spiritual world. Large groups of people historically have been animists. To them objects do have stories, hold memories, are “actors.” Things are alive in that vision. Introducing this notion of implied, it became clear that it was no longer about the relation between the object and the database, materialized in a “tag,” but that the relation itself was becoming an actor, a player in a world where you did not know why, and you could nor care less why or why not – you wanted to gather data. There is “something” in it.

Grasping this key paradigm shift, it then becomes clear that the stakes are very high. In 2001, Steve Halliday, then vice president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of tagging (RFID) technology, interviewed by Charlie Schmidt claimed: “If I talk to companies and ask them if they want to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can’t be anything but yes. It’s like giving them the opportunity to rule the world.”⁴ Since then the most publicized attempt to create one single architecture, an Object Name Server, is the story of the RFID standard called “EPC Global” -two standard bodies EAN and UCC merging to become GS1 in 2005. In a bold move that no regulator foresaw, they scaled their unit of data from being in a batch of 10,000 and thus uninteresting for individual consumers to that of the uniquely identifiable item.

TV: Gartner suggest IoT as a #4 business creation factor for the next 5 years. What are your thoughts? Is this true?

Credit: Image obtained from Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Identifies “Tipping Point” Technologies, Unlocking Long-Awaited Technology Scenarios

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RvK: Depending on how you define IoT, I would say definitely. Internet of Things influences changes in production (smart manufacturing, mass customization), consumption (economy of sharing, leasing vs ownership), energy (monitoring grids, households and devices), mobility (connected cars), decision making processes (shift to grassroots and local as data, information and project management tools come in the hands of ‘masses’), finance (IoT can sustain more currencies: Bitcoin, bartering, and again ‘leasing’) and creates the potential for convergence of the above shifts into a new kind of state and democratic model based on the notion of “platform.”

It is more an operation on the scale of: before and after the wheel, before and after printing/the book. In a kind of philosophical way you could say that it is the coming alive of the environment as an actor, it touches every human operation. The browser is only 20 years old – Mosaic being the first in 1993. The web has dramatically changed every segmented action in every sequence of operations that make up project management tools in any form of production and consumption. Because of this some people in the EU and elsewhere are trying to change IoT name-wise to something like Digital Transition. The Singularity is another way of looking at it. As a concept it is Borgian in the sense that the next big trends: Nano electronics and (DIY) biology are not in an emergent future realm as time to market could increase exponentially as they are drawn into being grasped within the connectivity that IoT is bringing.

Interested in reading more? Tune into Part 2 of Atmel’s 1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg. View Part 2  and Part 3

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¹ http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2013/06/27/how-to-intelligently-build-an-internet-of-things-iot/?goback=%2Egde_73311_member_253757229

² http://www.ramco.com/blog/5-cost-effective-ways-to-store-data-on-the-cloud

³ Carl Hoffman, Billionaire Boys Cup. High tech hits the high seas in a windblown battle between Craig McCaw and Larry Ellison. Carl Hoffman sets sail with Team OneWorld in the race to take back the America’s Cup.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/sailing_pr.html

⁴ Beyond the Bar Code – High-tech tags will let manufacturers track products from warehouse to home to recycling bin. But what’s great for logistics could become a privacy nightmare. By Charlie Schmidt, March 2001.http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/400913/beyond-the-bar-code/

MCU maestro talks ARM and Atmel’s SAM D20

Atmel Sr. Product Marketing Manager Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) recently sat down with ARM’s Andrew Frame to discuss the recently launched SAM D20 family of products.

As Eieland notes, the first ARM Cortex-M0+ powered lineup from Atmel is the general purpose SAM D20 family – ranging all the way from 32 pin devices with 16KB of embedded Flash to 64 pin 256KB devices.

“We have learnt a lot about microcontrollers (MCUs) since Atmel launched the first 8051 micro in 1995 and the first AVR in 1996,” Eieland explained. “A lot of this know-how is included in the new SAM D20 family: from simple things that make the devices easy to develop with like making the devices pin and code compatible, to more advanced system integration technologies.”

According to Eieland, there are a number of reasons why Atmel decided to move forward and bring a Cortex-M0+ based family to the market.

“First of all, we are a dedicated ARM partner and already have Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4 and Cortex-A5 products available, as well as products based on the ARM9 and ARM7 cores, so ensuring a complete ARM portfolio for our customers by extending the product offering downwards with a Cortex-M0+ was a natural thing to do,” he said.

“Secondly, the Cortex-M0+  market space is growing and we want to make sure that those developers who need more computational power than what you find in an 8 or 16-bit solution can find a product fit with Atmel. And last, but certainly not least, we are confident that mixing our AVR knowledge with an industry standard core allows us to bring a really good, unique and easy to use product to the market.”

The full text of the latest ARM-Atmel interview can be read here.

A closer look at Atmel’s Xplained Pro kits

Atmel’s comprehensive lineup of Xplained Pro boards offers engineers everything they need to start designing microcontroller (MCU) applications in minutes. First off, the boards are quite easy to connect, linking to PCs with just a USB cable.

As expected, the boards are automatically recognized by Atmel Studio, facilitating direct access to example projects and documentation. Meanwhile, hardware extension boards provide easy access to all functionality of the MCU.

Currently, Xplained Pro kits are grouped into three primary categories:

• Evaluation kits – Lowest cost kits starting at $39 for evaluating MCUs and developing with example projects in Atmel Studio.
• Starter kits – Low-cost bundle of MCU and extension boards starting at $99 for rapid application prototyping and development with Atmel Studio and Atmel Software Framework.
• Extension kits – Boards with additional functionality, connecting to Xplained Pro MCU boards through standardized connectors.

On the evaluation side, Atmel offers the SAM D20 Xplained Pro, SAM4N Xplained Pro, SAM4S Xplained Pro, SAM4L Xplained Pro and the ATmega256RFR2 Xplained Pro.

In terms of extension boards, there is the I/O1 Xplained Pro, OLED1 Xplained Pro, SLCD1 Xplained Pro and the PROTO1 Xplained Pro.

Interested in learning more? Be sure to stay tuned, because next time we’ll be getting up close and personal with Atmel’s MCU Xplained (evaluation) kits.

Wearable tech and the IoT

As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, wearable tech and the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) are intertwined. Simply put, the IoT refers to a future world where all types of electronic devices link to each other via the Internet. Today, it’s estimated that there are nearly 10 billion devices in the world connected to the Internet, a figure expected to triple to nearly 30 billion by 2020.

Recently, Ben Arnold, director of industry analysis for consumer technology at the NPD Group, told the AFP that traditional tech companies will have to start paying attention to how sensors are enabling us to live.

“[People] are ultimately going to become more aware of their data in the digital ether,” he explained. “I suspect wearables are going to disrupt the way tech firms are doing business now.”

Yesterday, Mike Muller, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of ARM, expressed his belief that wearable technology will indeed play a “key role” in taking the Internet of Things (IoT) to the next level.

“Wearable technology will be all about creating highly personalized experiences that enhance day-to-day leisure, work, convenience and health. These elements have become known as ‘the quantified self’, which is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on many aspects of a person’s daily life,” he told Business Today.

“This technology encompasses self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors and wearable computing. The IoT will enable devices to be joined, anywhere, anytime. The challenge is to make this new world work as easily and as seamlessly for the user, as for web pages to link to devices today.”

According to Mr. Muller, the future of the IoT will be realized when all of today’s devices (and future tech) are connected, sharing trusted data.

“The Internet of Things is an enabler. It will be driven by whoever has the energy and the best solutions. It will have many facets. Like the Internet, it is not one thing. Wearables will also disrupt app development. While fitness apps started the trend, it is set to branch out to cover other life and social functions,” said Mr. Muller.

“Interfaces continue to play an important part in this ecosystem – but the best ideas will undoubtedly drive some interesting new developments here too and even redefine what an interface actually is.”

Interested in learning more about wearable tech? Check out what Atmel has been up to in this exciting space.

Designing next-gen UIs with the SAMA5D3 MPU

Intuitive user interfaces (UIs) are ubiquitous for smartphones, tablets and personal media players. But what about user interfaces in the world of industrial automation applications and home control units?

Frédéric Gaillard, Atmel Product Marketing Manager, tells Bits & Pieces the use of MIMIC diagrams and traditional switches and rotary controls are still quite commonplace for industrial equipment. Ditto for home thermostats, the majority of which are mechanical.

“There are actually some very good reasons for this, as gloved hands, moisture, and condensation can play havoc with touchscreen controls. The industrial operating environment may dictate large switches for these reasons,” Gaillard explains.

“Safety considerations may warrant the use of traditional control mechanisms such as switches. Nevertheless, equipment manufacturers are keen to update both the functionality and cosmetic aesthetics of their products. Industrial automation equipment is increasingly networked.”

Clearly, when it comes to home automation, there is a need for an integrated display and control center to control heating, ventilation and smart-energy monitoring.

“You need a higher performance microprocessor, but with a more intuitive, easy-to-understand user interface (UI). When embarking on a new control panel application, embedded developers are likely to select a microprocessor device rather than a microcontroller,” says Gaillard.

“This is dictated by the processing power required for the connectivity and the need to manage a TFT LCD screen and associated UI. An example of such a microprocessor is the Atmel SAMA5D3 MPU, based on an ARM Cortex-A5 core. It’s 65nm low-power process geometry delivers up to 850 DMIPS (drhystone million instructions per second) at 536 MHz and up to 1,328 MB/s at a 166 MHz bus speed.”

The SAMA5D3 also features a floating-point unit (FPU) for high-precision compute-intensive applications, along with a 24-bit TFT LCD controller and graphics accelerator for image composition. Optimized for use in industrial control and HMI (human-machine interface) applications, the device is equipped with a comprehensive set of peripheral interfaces including dual Ethernet, high-speed USB and dual CAN.

Simply put, the Atmel SAMA5D3 MPU is an ideal candidate for most control panel-oriented designs. With its Cortex-A5 core and vector FPU, the MPU is capable of achieving accelerated graphics processing. Coupled with the 32-bit DDR (dual data rate) controller performing up to 1,328 MB/s, it offers enough raw horsepower to drive a high-resolution screen display via the 24-bit TFT LCD controller block. Resistive touchscreen support is integrated into the device, although one can alternatively interface to an external Atmel maXTouch capacitive touchscreen controller.

On the software side, Atmel has partnered with TimeSys to port the Qt framework and its comprehensive range of development tools for easy UI design. Qt can best be described as a cross-platform application framework with a reliable, easy-to-use toolkit to develop complex graphical user interfaces.

“Qt is based on a comprehensive set of widgets that you use to create a GUI screen design. Within the Qt Creator development environment, the Qt Designer tool allows you to lay out the interface design and plan the human interaction,” Gaillard adds.

“The excellent support for multimedia and 3D graphics, plus all the traditional concepts of text entry, check-boxes, and radio buttons, all help to facilitate the easy creation of industrial interface designs. Indeed, the Qt Designer creates C++ code that integrates into your application, while QML defines all the necessary visual graphical interface elements to create and animate visual interaction.”

Interested in learning more? Check out Atmel’s official white paper on the subject here.

A closer look at Atmel’s Peripheral Event System

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel recently introduced the SAM D20 MCU, an extensive product lineup based on ARM’s Cortex -M0+.

The SAM D20 boasts a number of power-saving techniques, including an event system that allows peripherals to communicate directly with each other without involving the CPU or bus resources. This is known as the Peripheral Event System.

According to Andreas Eieland, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Atmel, the Peripheral Event System can best be described as a routing network independent of the traditional data bus paths. Meaning, different triggers at the peripheral level can result in an event, like a timer tick triggering a reaction in another peripheral.

“Comprising 8 independent channels, the Event System offers a fixed latency of 2 cycles. Without any jitter it is a 100% deterministic method and a perfect fit for real-time applications,” Eieland explained.

“No events are lost and they are handled at a peripheral level in two cycles, even if the CPU is performing a non maskable interrupt. Traditionally the way of handling actions for a low power application would be through the use of interrupts, although they wake up the CPU.”

To better illustrate the advantages of an Event System, Eieland cited an example of a motor drive application using PWM.

“To detect erroneous situations, many motor applications use an analog comparator or ADC to measure the current going into the motor drive, in an over current situation you want to shut down the PWM channels driving the motor as soon as you can to prevent permanent damage to the circuit and for safety reasons,” he said.

“Without an Event System the overcurrent situation will trigger an interrupt, but the interrupt service request might be delayed if the CPU is performing other higher priority tasks. Using the Event System you can connect the analog comparator or ADC directly to the timer and always shut down the timer in two cycles, regardless of what the rest of the MCU is doing.”

Although Peripheral Event capabilities are useful on many different levels, the primary advantages of such a feature include minimizing power consumption, optimizing the off-loading of routine tasks from the CPU and achieving a totally predictable reaction time.

Additional information about Atmel’s Peripheral Event System can be found here.

A closer look at Atmel’s SAM D20 Xplained Pro eval kit

Atmel’s SAM D20 lineup is based on the ARM Cortex- M0+ core, setting a new benchmark for flexibility and ease-of-use. The recently launched MCU series is ideal for a number of low-power, cost-sensitive industrial and consumer devices, such as GPS trackers, appliance controllers, intelligent remotes and optical transceivers.

Perhaps most importantly, the SAM D20 also offers engineers easy access to an expansive array of software and hardware tools, including Atmel Studio 6 (free IDE with compiler) as well as the SAM D20 Xplained Pro evaluation kit.

The $39  kit supports the Atmel I/O1 Xplained Pro, OLED1 Xplained Pro and PROTO1 Xplained Pro extension boards, all of which can be purchased individually.

In terms of key specs, the board is powered by a SAMD20J18 microcontroller and features one mechanical reset button, a single mechanical user pushbutton (wake-up, bootloader entry or general purpose), a yellow user LED, 32.768kHz crystal and three Xplained Pro extension headers.

Additional specs include an embedded debugger, Auto-ID for board identification in Atmel Studio 6.1, one yellow status LED, one green board power LED, Data Gateway Interface (SPI, I²C, 4 GPIOs) and a virtual COM port (CDC).

Atmel’s SAM D20 Xplained Pro evaluation kit can be purchased here for $39.

Video: Touring the Arduino factory in Italy

As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel microcontrollers are the MCUs of choice for the Arduino platform, both in their AVR flavors and ARM varieties.

Essentially, Arduino has democratized hardware in a way that allows anyone – young or old, engineer or not, rich or poor – to create anything they can imagine.

As Arduino’s founder, Massimo Banzi puts it, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to create something great.”

Indeed, as every Maker knows, unboxing an Arduino board marks the beginning of a great DIY journey limited only by imagination. But where do the versatile boards come from? And just how are they made? Well, today we are take a closer look at where Arduino boards are “born,” allowing readers to get up close and personal with some of their favorite DIY components.

Recently, the official Maker Tour was in Torino to join the Arduino Camp organized by Officine Arduino and hosted by Fablab Torino.

During the tour, Enrico Bassi, president of the Fablab, was interviewed by Maker Faire (Rome). Bassi talked about his experience in the Maker Movement, while providing some background about the first fablab in the city.

The Maker Faire video crew also visited the factory where Arduino boards are manufactured, with Davide Gomba revealing the origins of the name “Arduino.” So there you have it: Arduino from start to finish!

Designing a board management controller with Atmel’s SAM D20 MCU

A board management controller (BMC) is a platform that monitors the physical state of an enclosure or system using physical sensors.  The sensors track a number of critical variables including humidity, temperature, power-supply voltage, fan speed, communications parameters and operating system functions.

Unsurprisingly, a BMC typically operates independently of the main system (out of band). Key design considerations of a board management controller include connectivity; multiple serial interfaces to communicate with various sensors and administrative terminal; low-power operation in low power mode to protect against system as well power outages; and continuous operation during system outages for uninterrupted system management.

A number of Atmel hardware components can be used to design a board management controller, including the SAM D20 ARM Cortex-M0+ (ARM) based MCU, the SHA204 Authentication IC (for security), 30TS temperature sensor and AT24/AT25 Serial EEPROM.

“The SAM D20 offers versatile connectivity options, low-power operation and a high level of integration to reduce BOM cost. Indeed, there are 6 SERCOM modules, each configurable as USART, I2C or SPI for sensors and terminal communication, thereby facilitating smaller packages and easier PCB layout,” Atmel engineer Bob Martin told Bits & Pieces. “Meanwhile, integrated 12-bit 300ksps ADC with gain stage removes the need for external components to monitor local battery voltage, as low-power operation ensures protection against system/power outages.”

Martin also noted that Atmel’s SAM D20 ensures high reliability even under system outages, with the platform featuring integrated 32-bit Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) of Flash, EEPROM emulation, as well as SRAM and integrated memory BIST (MBIST) to execute production testing of internal memories.

On the software side, the SAM D20 offers users access to an expansive array of tools and comprehensive ecosystem including Atmel Studio 6 (free IDE with compiler), Atmel’s Software Framework (ASF) with free SW libraries of production-ready source code. There is also the Atmel Gallery and the SAMD20 Xplained Pro Kit which boasts a built-in programmer and debugger with connectors for expansion wings.

Additional information about Atmel’s SAMD 20 MCU can be found here.

Building a GPS tracker with Atmel’s SAM D20 MCU

A GPS tracking unit uses the Global Positioning System to determine and record the precise location of a vehicle, device or individual. Key design requirements for a GPS tracker include a small form factor, low power consumption and flexible connectivity options.

Atmel’s recently launched SAM D20 ARM Cortex-M0+ based MCU can be used to power such a device, taking all of the above-mentioned design requirements into account.

“The SAM D20 MCU – embedded with serial communication modules (SERCOM) and low power consumption – provides the flexibility, connectivity and low power required for GPS tracker applications,” Atmel engineering manager Bob Martin told Bits & Pieces.

“How low is low in terms of power consumption? Well, we are talking about <150µA/MHz in active (CoreMark) and <2µA with RTC and full RAM retention. Meanwhile, the peripheral event system and intelligent peripherals with Atmel SleepWalking technology further reduce CPU activity and power consumption.”

Martin also noted that the SAM D20 MCU offers design engineers 6 highly flexible serial communication modules (SERCOM), each configurable to operate as USART, I2C and SPI – thereby facilitating easy and flexible connection to external sensors, memories, PCs and wireless modules.

As expected, Atmel supports a wide range of dev tools and software, including Atmel Studio 6 (free IDE with GCC compiler), Atmel Software Framework (free SW libraries of production ready source code), Atmel Gallery (open to extensions) and the SAM D20 Xplained Pro Kit which is packaged with programmer and debugger, as well as connectors for expansion wings.