Tag Archives: thermostats

Analyst says IoT a boon for Atmel



Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Andrew Uerkwitz says Atmel is “well-positioned” to benefit from the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT).

According to Uerkwitz, Atmel is one of a handful of companies that makes microcontrollers (MCUs) which will increasingly be in demand.

“As we move toward Internet of Things, if you think about everybody’s connected devices today, everybody has about three to four connected devices, meaning connected to each other in some way. And we believe within five to 10 years, that’s going to be about 10 devices,” Uerkwitz explains.

“Everyone’s going to have 10 things that are connected to the Internet or connected to a smartphone or just generally connected whether it’s in the automobile, in the home or in the office.”

As Uerkwitz notes, a number of devices, such as thermostats and televisions that may not currently be connected to the Internet will increasingly become “smart devices.” 

As this trend plays out, those devices will require the components that Atmel supplies.

“So, their core business has thousands of customers trying to add these microcontrollers to devices, consumer electronics, and we think that core business will grow nicely,” Uerkwitz adds.

Interested in learning more about the IoT? You can check out Atmel’s recent IoT SoMa panel on the subject here, Patrick Sullivan’s EELive! 2014 presentation and our extensive Bits & Pieces IoT article archive here.

Up close and personal with Atmel’s SAM4L Xplained Pro

As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel’s SAM4L is quite the versatile microcontroller (MCU), as it can be used to power a wide range of devices including glucose meters, game controllers, thermostats and remote process control nodes.

sam4lxplainedpro

“Essentially, Atmel’s SAM4L lineup of MCUs redefine the power benchmark for Cortex-M4 processor-based devices, delivering the lowest power in active mode (down to 90µA/MHz) as well as sleep mode with full RAM retention (1.5µA) with the shortest wake-up time (down to 1.5µs),” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces.

“Embedding Atmel picoPower technology, the SAM4L family provides highly efficient signal processing, ease of use and high-speed communication peripherals – all ideal for power-sensitive designs in the industrial, healthcare and consumer application areas.”

To accelerate development with the SAM4L, Atmel offers the SAM4L Xplained Pro, a hardware-based platform that allows engineers to more easily evaluate the ARM-powered SAM4LC4 MCU. Supported by the Atmel Studio integrated development platform, the kit provides easy access to various SAM4L features and explains how to integrate the device in a customer design. Like other Atmel Xplained Pro evaluation kits, the SAM4L Xplained Pro is capable of significantly expanding its original functionality by linking to additional Xplained Pro extension kits.

For a complete and ready to go package, engineers can also check out the ATSAM4L-XSTK starter kit, which is packaged with Atmel’s I/O1 Xplained Pro, OLED1 Xplained Pro, PROTO1 Xplained Pro and SLCD1 Xplained Pro extension boards.

Key SAM4L Xplained Pro specs include:

  • SAM4LC4 microcontroller
  • One mechanical reset button
  • One mechanical user pushbutton (wake-up, bootloader entry or general purpose)
  • One QTouch button
  • One yellow user LED
  • USB interface, host and device function (shared physical interface)
  • 32.768kHz crystal
  • 12MHz crystal
  • 4 Xplained Pro extension headers
  • One custom extension header for segment LCD displays
  • LDO/Buck regulator mode selection
  • LCD cluster power configuration option
  • Embedded Debugger
  • Auto-ID for board identification in Atmel Studio 6.1
  • One yellow status LED
  • One green board power LED
  • Symbolic debug of complex data types including scope information
  • Programming
  • Data Gateway Interface: USART, TWI, 4 GPIOs
  • Virtual COM port (CDC)
  • USB powered
  • Supported with application examples in Atmel Software Framework

The SAM4L Xplained Pro can be purchased here from Atmel’s store.

Praise the Lord!!! A New Sub-1GHz RF Transceiver Supporting 4 Major Regional Frequency Bands

Your prayers have been answered!  Atmel has just released its 2nd generation Sub1GHz IEEE 802.15.4-compliant RF transceiver, the Atmel® AT86RF212B.  Not only does it work in Europe (863-870MHz) and North America (902-928MHz), like some of the sub-1GHz RF transceivers you see in the market today, it also works in China and Japan compatible with the 779-787MHz and 915-930MHz regional frequency bands, respectively.  

map

The device is a feature-rich, extremely low power Sub1GHz RF transceiver designed for industrial and consumer ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4, IPv6/6LoWPAN and high data rate Sub1GHz ISM band applications. The RF transceiver offers a true SPI-to-antenna solution, integrating all RF-critical components, except the antenna, crystal and decoupling capacitors.

It is designed specifically for these applications in mind:

  • Lighting control
  • Gas and water meters
  • Thermostats
  • Environmental monitoring
  • Remotes
  • Toys
  • Doorphones
  • Proprietary wireless systems up to 1000kb/s

To help with your design and prototyping needs, we have a slew of software and hardware tools at your disposal, such as the Wireless Composer for providing a performance analyzer application and contains easy-to-understand displays to configure, command, and monitor information coming from the performance test application running on the target, which is available through the Atmel Gallery app store (available in Studio 6).  Additionally, we also offer the Atmel BitCloud® ZigBee® PRO stack, the Atmel IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, and the Atmel Lightweight Mesh software stack

From the H/W side, we offer an evaluation kit that is shipped preprogrammed with the Atmel Radio Performance Analyzer application for easy evaluation of the RF transceiver’s key features and performance.

AT86RF212B eval kit

Please stay tuned on upcoming posts about why sub-1GHz is preferred over 2.4GHz in some designs and tips/tricks on how to use the Wireless Composer.