Have you ever browsed through your smartphone pics and wished you could print copies in a moment’s notice? A new device, aptly namedSnapJet, is now making that a reality. The open-source, instant-film printer — which has made its Kickstarter debut — uses Polaroid technology to let users wirelessly print their photos directly from a smartphone.
Impressively, the SnapJet doesn’t require any mobile app, wires, or other connections, such as Wi-Fi, NFC or even Bluetooth. As its creators note, “All you need to do is put your phone on top, and push a single button to print beautiful photos.”
Aside from its simplicity, what really sets this device apart is its portability. Given it size, users can now work on scrapbooks in a coffee shop, or make a real-time birthday cards just captured during the party.
How does it work? Users simply place their phone face-down on top of the SnapJet. The SnapJet then scans the image on the screen and prints it out on either Polaroid 300 or Fujifilm Instax film, using the light from the phone’s display to develop the film at resolutions up to 1,200 dpi. According to the team, if you upgrade your phone, the print quality gets even better!
Powered by an Atmel AT90USB1286, the SnapJet also features an OLED display and other connectivity options — like USB and BLE — just in case you feel the need retouch a few pics, or for those Makers out there, the urge to reprogram or hack the open-source device.
The team says it will be releasing each of its designs and schematics to the DIY community, which will enable tinkerers to access their PCBs, CAD models and everything else required to create a fully-functional SnapJet.
“We want to empower our users to hack, re-program, and re-purpose SnapJet, even commercially,” the team writes. “We want open source hardware to be the new standard for physical devices. Consumers should know exactly what’s inside their devices. No toxic chemicals or parts that are designed to wear out and force upgrades. We think open-source is the only effective path to fighting planned obsolescence, and making innovation more democratic.”
Though instant Polaroid photos may seem like a relic of the past, the SnapJet proves otherwise. If you’d like to get your hands on one, head on over to its official Kickstarter page here. Currently, early bird SnapJets are going for just $129, with a projected delivery date of December 2015.
Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider Libelium has added long-range wireless coverage to its Waspmote and Plug and Sense! sensor nodes, by integrating Semtech’s LoRa RF technology in a new module-on-a-chip embedded radio design for smart cities and IoT deployments.
Powered by Atmel’s ATmega1281 MCU, Waspmote sensor nodes are designed to deploy by the thousands, connecting any sensor using any communication protocol to any cloud system. The LoRa communication protocol extends wireless connectivity, thereby enabling Waspmote sensors to transmit data at distances of several miles, over 20 miles in open spaces, and even through buildings. With LoRa’s high sensitivity of 138dBm, the Waspmote long-range module can receive data packets transmitted through difficult conditions and long links, thus reducing infrastructure costs for city uses.
“We’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Semtech engineers to shrink the module form factor to integrate within our Waspmote sensor platform,” said David Gascón, Libelium CTO. “With LoRa we are offering new connectivity features and we have achieved a price reduction of 10-25% per node compared to our current product line. Our goal is to help customers select the wireless radio options that best suit their needs, in any environment.”
Aside from the ATmega1281 MCU, key Waspmote specs include 8KB SRAM, 4KB EEPROM, 128KB Flash, -10ºC, +65ºC temperature range and an RTC (32KHz) clock.
“The Libelium Waspmote solution, combined with LoRa, reduces the infrastructure cost to deploy smart city applications and improving the return on investment will accelerate more deployments,” explained Hardy Schmidbauer, Director of Wireless and IoT products at Semtech. “The flexibility and availability of more than 80 sensors in Waspmote, paired with the LoRa benefits of long range and extended battery lifetime create a very compelling solution.”
While ARM TechCon 2014 may be a thing of the past, product releases, discussions and trends from the show floor continue to make their way forward. Case in point, Design World’s Aimee Kalnoskas recently sat down with our very own Kaivan Karimi to discuss the building blocks of the ever-growing Internet of Things in a candid post-TechCon interview. During the conversation, the Atmel VP and GM of Wireless Solutions shares his insights and adds flavor and some color to this ‘thing’ commonly referred to as IoT. You can read the entire interview — which was brought to our attention by our friends at ARM and whose original article can be found here — in its entirety below.
AK: What do you think the IoT infrastructure looks like? How does it compare to the current communications infrastructure?
KK: The first thing we must do is to define the IoT industry infrastructure properly – what kinds of devices are connected and how are they connected. We then define the infrastructure of IoT services to determine what the weak points within this infrastructure and how do we resolve them.
First, let us define the weak points. For a while, the cellular operators where the ones claiming that IoT was all about cellular “telemetry-like” services. In IoT, most “things” will be battery operated, requiring long battery lives. But if you assume a cellphone tower is making the connections through an LTE modem with less than two days of battery life, then you can see why edge nodes of IoT have practically nothing to do with cellular. Additionally, IoT is all about secure low data rate command- and control- type of communications, but cellular generally is not. The fact is that by the time IoT services role out, cellular pipes will only carry about five to 10 percent of the WAN traffic. There are many reasons why cellular is the wrong pipe.
IoT communications infrastructure would be based on a “smart” box inside of the home or premise –hierarchical gateways – but not the access points of today. Today’s access points only switch, route and collect information upstream or retrieve it from downstream. For IoT, there will be a new generation of smart gateways that will have intelligence on board to process the information, make decisions, and disperse that information. This “smart gateway” functionality could be an add-on to the existing access points or set-top boxes, or could be a standalone box, but the bottom line is that the “intelligence” will move to the customer premises versus only in the cloud today.
A smart gateway accesses the cloud using various WAN communication technologies, which would be different than BAN/PAN/LAN connectivity technologies used inside the home or on premise. Due to the variety of end segments IoT covers, the smart gateway can be installed anywhere, depending on the use case and application within a given IoT segment.
For example in a smart-highway use case, the gateway is inside a shiny cabinet on the side of a bridge, communicating with tiny seismic sensors (microphones) positioned on the bridge. In the Western world, we have an aging infrastructure, with multiple incidents of collapsing bridges in the past few years. Each of these inexpensive seismic sensors can generate a ping every 30 seconds measuring the integrity of the bridge every 30 minutes or so, and ensure against future bridge collapses.
In this case, communication from the sensor to the gateway or the box is short-range. That can be one of the many 802.15.4 (mesh) technologies such as ZigBee, 6LowPAN, Wireless Hart, etc. Communication through the gateway to the cloud, on the other hand, is WAN connectivity such as Fiber/Ethernet through local networks, cellular, satellite, PLM/PLC, or the next generation of IoT pipes in sub-GHz bands such as SigFox, Weightless, etc.
AK: What’s the role of the smart gateway with regards to provisioning a service?
KK: Think about how you create value as a service provider. It’s this idea of service provision. You need to be concerned not only about connecting the widget but the service delivery frameworks that sit on top of that connection and manage the overall system ensuring quality of service, as well as security of the service.
Smart gateways are key drivers for IoT communications. For instance, a smart gateway in a home could involve communication between thermostats to the gateway box but there is little value in simply connecting these widgets. You need to create a tangible value – the box needs to provision the IoT service. Also note that not everyone is technology savvy enough to program these connections….something we usually lose sight of in Silicon Valley. It needs to become foolproof so that a non-techy can use it just as easily. Again, service providers will play a key role in that.
There is a belief that the IoT edge nodes will generate massive amounts of data and this will all go to the cloud, so you need a lot of bandwidth, a lot of storage space, and data management in the cloud. This is a big fallacy advertised by the people who make money from big bandwidth or cloud storage.
Let’s illustrate what we mean here: For example, consider a thermostat in your home set between 73 and 75 degrees F. A sensor comes on every few seconds and notes what the temperature is. The gateway box gets that information and registers it but it doesn’t need to send it to the cloud because that’s not necessary (not a “cloud-worthy” event). The gateway captures the event from a certain time span and simply registers it – say from 1:25PM to 1:45PM it was 74 degrees F. Now, if the sensor communicates to the box that the temperature has gone to 76 degrees F, then the box activates the air conditioner (actuates). But it still doesn’t need to go to the cloud.
At some point, the thermostat might reach 90 degrees in a couple of readings and then, two intervals later, 110 degrees. The box determines that this is not a false reading but, perhaps, an event and alerts the smoke detector to the event. Smoke sensed by the device confirms the event.
The gateway then communicates this information to the cloud and an emergency call is triggered to the fire department. Test have shown that in a scenario like this, when the sensor device (i.e. thermostat) and gateway are involved, you shave about 15 to 18 minutes of police or EMT-response time off of an otherwise manual 911 call. This event is an exception that goes to the cloud right away. Think about how often someone’s house catches on fire, and you see that indeed this is an exception and not the rule.
In a mobile health (mHealth) application, you could monitor heart rate or check other biometrics with the gateway box perhaps every five minutes. The sensor simply delivers the information to the box as opposed to the scenario where a healthcare worker checks in with a patient every few hours and spends less than three seconds checking vitals. If you are monitoring a potential heart attack patient and the vitals are within range, then the box records the event as satisfactory. But if the patient is having a heart attack, that is an exception to the event and the box calls the hospital.
The bottom line is that it is not necessary to be continuously communicating to the cloud. Because you upload metadata and not all the data at scheduled intervals, you consume far less bandwidth and power.
AK: What are the real or perceived challenges with adding connectivity to devices for IoT?
KK: The reason the industry has challenges is that most wireless-device connectivity technologies (i.e. Wi-Fi, BT) traditionally have been designed for cellular, enterprise, and data communications. In these applications, the device is always on so the off state is not a consideration. These are also data-intensive applications that demand bandwidth to carry the data. However, IoT devices such as the tiny sensors in thermostats, smoke detectors, or entries to a house, or those sensors on the bridges, or moister sensors in a farm, for example, are almost all battery-operated devices and spend most of their time in sleep or off condition.
If you architect it the traditional way then, yes, you will have power-consumption issues. In IoT, the total cost of ownership is extremely important, due to the large number of devices that will be deployed. Hence, it is not cost effective to send technicians out into the field to change batteries on these devices every four to six months. In consumer applications, the batteries need to last between four and five years, and in industrial anywhere from eight-12 years. What we need for IoT communication devices is a new generation of wireless connectivity solutions, built from the ground up for IoT applications and battery operation. Implementing Wi-Fi in an IoT application cannot be about simply retrofitting from another market where power consumption is far less of a consideration and using it now for IoT, which most vendors are doing today.
Connectivity in IoT is a new way of doing things, hence you need to enable additional modes of operation (including deep-sleep modes) from a software and device-architecture perspective. You also need to enable very fast shut down and wake-up time, as well as partial memory retention to bring the device back to a known state of connection with the least leakage current possible.
One size does not fit all in IoT connectivity and a broad portfolio is required. If a vendor does not have multiple wireless technology capabilities, they cannot offer a complete solution. Simply because you don’t have expertise in a technology or IP, does not mean that the technology is not applicable. Even in 802.15.4, you use ZigBee for lighting and use 6lowPAN for home automation, but you may also need Bluetooth Smart and/or NFC for secure pairing in a multimode solution.
AK: What role do microcontrollers play in this market?
KK: From an architecture perspective, IoT devices are smart devices and what makes them smart is the tiny MCU. All IoT edge nodes include an MCU or MPU, connectivity, sensors and sensing platforms, and an energy source. About 85 percent of IoT devices use MCUs, and the rest will use MPUs. Design an MCU into a toaster oven with a user interface and you can control it in a more predictable and systematic manner. It now has become a “smart” toaster. Add the appropriate connectivity and you can now communicate and control that smart toaster remotely. And because these devices are sleeping most of the time, they benefit from the nonvolatile memory (FLASH) in many MCUs. When the power is off, the device’s memory retains the content.
That’s why thousands of application developers are turning to MCUs. Maker movements are the perfect example of how MCUs in the hand of smaller players are fueling the innovations on the edge node side of IoT. There were nearly 17 billion MCUs sold in 2013 alone and approximately 170 to 200 billion over the past 10 year. Most of these were never connected wirelessly or networked in the traditional sense of “networking”. Suddenly, MCUs are becoming even more popular because they are the intelligence behind IoT devices. They will go into the sensors which connect to gateways which connect to the cloud, yet a lot of MCU developers don’t necessarily have the expertise in connectivity, networking, and security.
AK: How will the industry address the learning curve of designers who must transform a previously non-IoT device into an IoT device?
KK:It’s true that many of the current MCU developers are not security and connectivity experts and that is a challenge. Remember that the majority of IoT – about 95 percent – is industrial IoT which is a wide application spread out among thousands of small- to medium-sized companies. These SMEs aren’t in a position to hire another couple of dozen people simply for connectivity and security expertise. As an MCU supplier, you need to understand MCU designers and the fact they are using products without the full expertise needed to optimally use connectivity and security.
At Atmel, we have over 40,000 MCU customers. With that many customers, we have had to learn how to sell in a no-touch fashion, leveraging our tools and development environment. I believe we will measure success in the IoT market by how well you can get to the point with mass market MCU developers where they can “consume” connectivity and security in a no-touch fashion without needing to become experts at it.
AK: What types of companies stand to benefit the most from IoT and why do you feel the Maker community is a key component to success?
KK: There are two sets of players in the IoT market: the traditional MCU companies who have the channels and reach into the mass market, and the traditional wireless connectivity companies whom I call “elephant hunters” since they have traditionally been focused on tens – not thousands – of customers. Most traditional MCU companies don’t have the level of connectivity expertise or the IP required, or their understanding of “things” is elementary. On the other hand, connectivity companies while they have rich connectivity know-how, don’t have the channels and mass market reach or expertise – an absolute must have for this market. Loyalty in channels takes years to develop, and is not an overnight situation into which you can buy your way.
Based on the dynamics of the edge nodes where billions of devices are to be developed, I believe it is the MCU guys who are at the center of IoT-device development. The MCU player that can provide a broad range of MCUs and MPUs, and simultaneously a full portfolio of connectivity solutions (including Wi-Fi which is the toughest nut to crack between all short-range connectivity technologies), will be the winner and capture this market.
Just as in nearly any other market, the majority of innovation in electronics came from small players. Because IoT is so wide and has so many different segments involved, there is the potential for thousands of starts ups to innovate.
Importantly for IoT, smaller players heavily equates to the Maker community. There are over 1.3 million Arduino users, and of course our partnership with them has made our MCUs prominent on Arduino platforms. You simply can’t establish these this kind of community, allegiances, customers, or critical channels overnight. It’s a 10- to 15-year investment. As an example we have 680,000+ AVR freaks in our community. How long do you think it will take for a newcomer to develop a technology community of that size?
Atmel is committed to becoming the number one fully-integrated edge node provider in the world through an expanded MCU and MPU portfolio, sensing platforms, full IoT communications technologies built from the grounds up for battery operations, integrated security, and a whole host of software offerings related to service delivery and provisioning. Along with this we are establishing a robust ecosystem of partners that can jointly provide full IoT system solutions from the tiniest edge nodes to the service providers in the cloud seamlessly.
At each step along the way, we are bringing innovation, ease-of-use, and integrated solutions to conserve power, extend battery life, ensure data security, and conform to wireless standards in the next big connected design. It’s our way of powering the possibilities of next-generation ideas. Get started today enabling a smarter world of tomorrow!
If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss, and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing, or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.
In other words, the IoT refers to a future world where all types of electronic devices link to each other via the Internet. From smart walls to smart homes, connected trackers to connected cars, soon everything will be online.
The infographic below from software company Aria Systems details not only the past 10 years, but explores both the present and future of the Internet of Things.
Last year, the team over at CSR unveiled what they dubbed the world’s thinnest wireless keyboard to demonstrate the future of computing. Measuring at less than a half of a millimeter thick and equipped with Bluetooth Smart technology, the pad was able to transform essentially any area into a touch surface. Combining the company’s low-power wireless technology with the latest in flexible electronics and touchscreen sensing, the keyboard connected to and extended the touch interfaces of devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
In order to bring this idea to life, CSR — now part of Qualcomm — utilized Atmel’s touch silicon to sense multiple contact points on a surface, offer a full touch interface and power optimized key detection.
In an attempt to make sous vide cooking more accessible to the home chef, the team behind the Nomiku Immersion Circulator recently turned to Kickstarter to unveil a new prototype that features Wi-Fi connectivity.
Its creators describe sous vide cooking as “cooking food in a low temperature water bath while your ingredients are under a vacuum seal in a plastic bag.” In fact, cooking food at a sustained temperature in a sealed environment allows for the most delicious and ideal chemical reactions to occur within food. Interestingly enough, sous vide cooking doesn’t fall in line with the “quick and easy” mantra of many modern meals. That said, even though it takes slightly longer than a microwave dinner, the end result is undeniably tasty.
Catering to the rapidly growing Internet of Things, the newest evolution of the Nomiku includes Wi-Fi connectivity, which enables the clip-on device to be controlled by a smartphone. To further streamline the product, the team developed a single knob for controlling temperature, in addition to a fully-functional touchscreen. Compared to its original design, the recently-unveiled Nomuku clips to the front of the pan rather than the back, and can work with as little as 1.5 inches of water depth, while heating with an impressive 1200W of power.
Embedded with an ATtiny88 MCU, the Nomiku is equipped to receive inputs from the accompanying Tender smartphone application. Tender — available on both the iOS and Android platforms — grants users the ability to share recipes throughout the sous vide cooking community. With a few clicks and the correct ingredients, a home chef could have a Gordon Ramsay-like recipe brewing on their stove in just a matter of minutes.
With all of these additional features, the second iteration of the Nomiku Immersion Circulator (unsurprisingly) reached its $200,000 Kickstarter goal in a matter of 12 hours, garnering just over $750,000 throughout its campaign. Previously, sous vide cooking has been reserved for high-class restaurants and foodie-centric reality shows. With the widespread adoption of the Atmel powered Nomiku, a true home food revolution could be at hand… or well, clipped to your pan.
“We wanted everyone to create restaurant quality food in their own kitchen.” CEO Lisa Fetterman explains. To further grow the home sous vide chef community, the Nomiku team plans to constantly release recipes on their blog and through their various social media accounts.
Before a sold-out Symposium/ITxpo crowd, Gartner revealed its top predictions for IT organizations and users for 2015 and beyond, examining a shift in the age old relationships between man and machine due to the emergence of digital business.
“For some time now, there has been an ongoing shift in the roles machines play in our everyday lives. Machines are taking on more human characteristics in order to affect a more personalized relationship with human beings,” explained Daryl Plummer, Chief Gartner Fellow. “And we find ourselves contemplating a near-term future of a world in which machines and humans are co-workers, and possibly even co-dependents.”
Gartner’s top 10 predictions encompass these ideas of human machine cooperation and growth.
1. By 2018, digital business will require 50% less business process workers and 500% more key digital business jobs, compared with traditional models.
2. By 2017, a significant disruptive digital business will be launched that was conceived by a computer algorithm. Through 2015, the most highly valued initial public offerings (IPOs) will involve companies that combine digital markets with physical logistics to challenge pure physical legacy business ecosystems.
3. By 2018, the total cost of ownership for business operations will be reduced by 30% through smart machines and industrialized services. Plummer explains that smart machines will not replace humans as people still need to steer the ship and are critical to interpreting digital outcomes; rather, will displace the complacency, inefficiency and add tremendous velocity to business operations.
4. By 2020, developed world life expectancy will increase by 0.5 years due to widespread adoption of wireless health monitoring technology. As Gartner points out, wearable monitors — many of which powered by Atmel MCUs — hold huge promise.
Today, a simple wristband can collect heartbeat, temperature and a number of environmental factors. Wireless heart monitoring patches, smart shirts and sensors in accessories promise more accuracy, choice and comfort to wearers. Soon, data from remote monitoring devices will provide continued access from patients to medical practitioners.
5. By year-end 2016, more than $2 billion in online shopping will be performed exclusively by mobile digital assistants. In addition, these mobile digital assistants will have taken on tactical mundane processes, such as filling out names, addresses and credit card information, come late next year.
6. By 2017, U.S. customers’ mobile engagement behavior will drive mobile commerce revenue in the U.S. to 50% of U.S. digital commerce revenue. Increasingly powerful smartphones and tablets, and the correspondingly rich and powerful applications available for each, enable consumers and business customers to interact seamlessly with companies, content and commerce experiences at virtually all stages of the purchase process.
7. By 2017, 70% of successful digital business models will rely on deliberately unstable processes designed to shift as customer needs shift.
8. By 2017, 50% of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations.
9. By 2017, nearly 20% of durable goods e-tailers will use 3D printing to create personalized product offerings. As consumers increasingly show an appetite to control more product features and capabilities, e-tailers are recognizing the business potential of moving from “configurable” products to “personalized” made-to-order products enabled by [AVR XMEGA, megaAVR and SAM3X8E powered] 3D printers.
According to Gartner, nearly every single durable goods category will see a surge in 3D-printed enabled personalization, and manufacturers will develop capabilities for bringing the consumer closer to the design experience. The companies that set the strategy early will end up defining the space within their categories, the research firm urges.
10. By 2020, retail businesses that utilize targeted messaging in combination with internal positioning systems (IPS) will see a five percent increase in sale. Gartner notes that indoor positioning systems have become increasingly viable.
Rather than using satellites, these systems use low-energy Bluetooth and Wi-Fi access points to pinpoint a mobile device’s location inside a building, with accuracies in the centimeter range. Support within newer mobile devices for IPS will enable location cues for targeted ads and messages, and real-time mapping to lead customers not only to store locations, but to specific products themselves.
This partnership broadens the ecosystem support for developers using Atmel’s portfolio of secure, low-power and cost-effective wireless connectivity solutions, specifically the Atmel SmartConnect Wi-Fi and 802.15.4-compliant solutions. Additionally, IoT developers for smart wearables, connected appliances, home automation systems and more can now bring their products faster to market.
Built around open standards, the mbed platform combines Internet protocols, security and standards-based manageability into one integrated system, and gathers silicon, cloud and device partners in one community. Atmel | SMART SAMR21 and WINC1500 customers now gain access to the mbed OS software platform, which includes command-line tools, a low-power HAL, as well as advanced networking protocols like 6LoWPAN and Thread to significantly accelerate IoT development.
“The ARM mbed IoT Device Platform simplifies the development and deployment of next-generation IoT devices and cloud services,” said Krisztian Flautner, ARM General Manager, IoT Business.“The integration of Atmel’s wireless technology with the mbed platform allows IoT developers to rapidly create devices that communicate across a mesh network with cloud services. This will drive the acceleration of the IoT in consumers and industrial markets.”
“As a leader in the IoT market, Atmel is committed to enabling developers of all levels the opportunity to bring their IoT devices quickly to market,” explained Steve Pancoast, Atmel Vice President of Software Applications, Tools and Development. “In this fragmented market place, we are leading the charge to bring easy-to-use hardware, software, development tools and platform solutions to market and enabling our IoT developers more time to focus on critical features in their design. By partnering with ARM on their mbed platform, we’ve taken another step towards making the 50 billion devices for the IoT market a reality.”
Back in 2007, the original ArduIMU launched with the capability of being a fully-functional inertial measurement unit based on Arduino. Seven years later, Ahmad Byagowi’s team has brought the ArduIMU V4 to life with countless added abilities.
The V4 — which recently launched on Kickstarter — is described as “a beefed up successor to the original ArduIMU project and a fully capable wireless Integrated Measurement Unit (IMU).” Based on Atmel’s ATmega128RFA1, the 100% Arduino-compatible ArduIMU’s wireless functionality allows the device to monitor 9-axis motion and use sensors to analyze temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and even visible light.
While these are the listed functions of the V4, the team aspires that Makers and hackers will work within the community to expand the device’s capabilities. “The ArduIMU V4 is not just useful to applications which require inertial measurement, but has evolved into a powerful and versatile hardware framework for hobbyists, Makers and hackers,” a company rep writes.
The new ArduIMU offers users access to SPI, I2C, UART (0 & 1), analog input and PWM output, therefore enabling developers to take their own ideas and design custom shields for the V4. Additionally, the team was able to compile the Contiki OS on the ArduIMU V4 and use it for various projects, including implementing 6LoWPAN for a network of multiple units. Hello, IoT!
So what exactly could you use a machine like this for in your daily life? The team suggests implementations ranging from using it to sense humidity or tracking regional weather changes to monitoring a plant’s health or helping to fly your quadcopter.
According to its creators, the ArduIMU V4 is equipped with a built-in Micro-USB port for charging and communication with a host computer. “Since we used a standard FTDI USB-Serial chip, you don’t have to worry about finding finicky drivers to make it work. To communicate wirelessly, you simply use two ArduIMU V4 units and set up wireless communication between them,” the team explains. “Of course, the ArduIMU V4 can do both at the same time, so you could have one ArduIMU V4 out sampling data and sending it wirelessly to a second ArduIMU V4 that is plugged into your computer’s USB port to do some heavy number-crunching.”
While existing ZigBee devices can be used to communicate with the ArduIMU V4, the team is still actively working on an easy to use Arduino-style framework to make this feature more accessible to those with minimal MCU development experience.
With the help of the Kickstarter campaign, the team is looking to manufacture their first 500 ArduIMU V4 units. With all materials already sourced, “All required schematic files and parts lists are fully completed and ready, reducing and hopefully eliminating most of the problems and delays you may find with many other Kickstarter campaigns.”
Atmel has expanded its leading SmartConnect wireless portfolio with four new turnkey system-on-chips (SoCs): the WILC1000 and WINC1500. Each SoC extends the company’s already broad portfolio of wireless connectivity options with the latest 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi capability, seamlessly integrating Newport Media’s (NMI) solutions in just two months.
If you recall, NMI was acquired back in July 2014, thereby enabling Atmel to offer designers and Makers the industry’s most comprehensive wireless portfolio of smart, connected devices for the growing Internet of Things (IoT). The acquisition immediately added 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to its existing offerings and has accelerated the company’s introduction of low-energy Bluetooth products, Atmel CEO Steve Laub recently explained. “Combined with our existing Wi-Fi and ZigBee solutions and industry leading microcontroller portfolio, Atmel is positioned for substantial growth in the Internet of Things marketplace.”
Both wireless solutions are compatible with existing Atmel microcontroller solutions and can connect to all Atmel AVR or Atmel | SMART MCUs. The new WINC1500 is an IEEE 802.11b/g/n IoT network controller, while the WILC1000 is an IEEE 802.11b/g/n IoT link controller.
Expanding on Atmel’s Wi-Fi offering, the WILC1000 and WINC1500 are SoC solutions optimized for battery-powered IoT applications. These wireless SoCs feature fully-integrated power amplifiers for the industry’s best communication range, without compromising cost or performance. Both the WILC1000 and WINC1500 are add-on solutions which can connect to any Atmel MCU or eMPU targeting a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT), consumer and industrial applications. Both products are available either as fully-certified modules ready for production to accelerate a designer’s time-to-market or as discrete SoCs for customers requiring the highest design flexibility.
“Atmel is excited to offer one of the broadest portfolios of differentiated wireless MCU solutions in the industry to further enable more smart, connected devices in the era of the Internet of Things,” said Kaivan Karimi, Atmel Vice President of Wireless Solutions. “Connected devices that were once a concept are becoming a reality because of innovations that are allowing devices to be smaller, easier to use, faster and more powerful—but are lower in power and optimized for battery operations. When these products are paired with Atmel’s broad portfolio of products, along with comprehensive technologies, OEMs and small developers are allowed to streamline the production of the next wave of IoT devices.”
Atmel’s SmartConnect family can be connected to any ultra-low power MCUs or eMPUs and wireless connectivity solutions into an easy, turnkey IoT solution. SmartConnect enables Wi-Fi Internet connectivity using ultra-low power for IoT edge/sensing nodes markets, therefore reducing overall bill of materials. In addition, the latest solutions accelerate development time for cost-effective, battery-operated applications in the residential, healthcare, industrial, smart energy and wearable markets.
As Reza Kazerounian, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MCU Business Unit at Atmel, previously noted, ultra-low power wireless connectivity is critical for embedded applications in the era of IoT. “[That is why] Atmel’s SmartConnect technology is about simplifying the use of embedded wireless connectivity technologies and enabling users to accelerate their time-to-market. This simplicity allows all players to participate in the IoT market, fueling the innovation needed to accelerate adoption.”
The WILC1000 and WINC1500 provide multiple peripheral interfaces such as UART, SPI, SDIO and I2C. The only external clock source needed is a high-speed crystal or oscillator with a wide variety of reference clock frequencies supported (between 12 – 50 MHz) and are IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, RF, Baseband, MAC certified.
No OS small footprint host driver (4KB flash – less than 1KB RAM)
Interested in the newest members of the SmartConnect family? The WILC1000 and WINC1500 are both now available — WILC1000 as a chip and three different modules; the WINC1500 as a chip and a module, with an evaluation kit featuring Atmel’s SAM D21 MCU.
