ARTIK - the new IoT platform from Samsung

Samsung has recently announced their ARTIK Internet-of-Things platform, aimed at enabling faster, simpler development of new enterprise, industrial and consumer-facing IoT applications and products. ARTIK is an open platform that includes a family of powerful integrated hardware modules, advanced software, development boards, drivers, tools, security, cloud and wireless connectivity features designed to help accelerate development of a generation of better, smarter IoT devices, solutions and services.

According to Samsung, in ARTIK they are providing the industry's most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products. By leveraging Samsung's established full-stack expertise in embedded mobile hardware and software, RF design, silicon-level component fabrication and packaging, consumer-facing design and high-volume manufacturing. Thus Samsung’s ARTIK is well positioned to allow developers working in the Internet-of-Things space to rapidly turn great ideas into market-leading products and applications.

The platform is based around a series of hardware modules and supporting software optimised for Internet-of-Things products and similar applications, with each building-block module fitting a powerful processor, rich connectivity and robust security inside a very small package.

This includes a variety of hardware configurations tailored to meet the requirements of a wide range of IoT needs, from wearable computing and home automation to smart lighting and industrial applications. With multiple tiers of hardware allowing you to optimise performance, memory, physical footprint and cost as needed, ARTIK can scale to support a variety of applications from small battery-powered devices through to powerful network gateway appliances with storage, local processing and media capability.

Depending on the configuration, the ARTIK family supports all major wireless connectivity technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (including Bluetooth Low Energy) and 802.15.4/ZigBee. All devices in the ARTIK hardware family include multi-core ARM processors and integrated Bluetooth Low Energy wireless connectivity.

ARTIK 1, the smallest and most power efficient ARTIK module, is the smallest complete network-connected IoT compute module currently on the market, combining Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity and a 9-axis inertial measurement unit with powerful compute capabilities and efficient power consumption all in a tiny 12mm-by-12mm package.

This module is designed specifically for low-power, small-form-factor mobile IoT applications, and can provide weeks of runtime on a single battery charge. According to Samsung, an ARTIK-based smart watch can run for three weeks on a single charge while being kept in always-on mode and paired to a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone.

The next model up, the ARTIK 5 - incorporates a 1 GHz dual-core processor, increased on-board DRAM and Flash memory - delivering a powerful balance of size, power efficiency, price and performance which is pitched by Samsung as being ideal for home automation hubs, high-end wearable computing applications and autonomous vehicles such as UAVs, where greater amounts of computing power and more wireless networking options are required.

The ARTIK 5 module uses Samsung's ePoP (Embedded Package-on-Package) packaging technology to offer significant computing performance and storage capacity in a very compact form factor, enabling a broad range of size-sensitive devices and applications.

The most powerful device in the ARTIK hardware family, the ARTIK 10, is pitched at applications in home automation servers, embedded multimedia and industrial applications. It delivers high performance for IoT and embedded multimedia applications, with an eight-core ARM processor, full 1080p video encoding and decoding, 5.1 audio, and 2Gb of DRAM with 16Gb of Flash memory for plenty of media storage. It is ideal for applications with heavier local performance and storage requirements or demanding video encoding and playback needs.

The ARTIK 5 and ARTIK 10 models also include Wi-Fi, dual-mode Bluetooth support, 802.15.4/ZigBee and Thread network connectivity, making them potentially very useful as gateways or bridge devices in home automation networks, connecting together many different kinds of wireless IoT devices.

All the hardware platforms in Samsung's ARTIK family include advanced embedded hardware security technology, on-board storage and strong processing power in an open platform.

Security is a key element of the software integrated into the platform, along with the ability to connect to the Internet for cloud-based data analytics and Web services. The ARTIK platform comes with an extensive IoT software stack and tools to help you accelerate product development.

Developers can go directly to application framework development, instead of spending time building low-level software libraries. Every ARTIK device comes pre-loaded with the Temboo software stack for connected devices, which aims to help ARTIK developers quickly and easily develop connected ARTIK-based IoT applications.

In conjunction with the Temboo website, this lets you quickly generate code for the IoT applications you're building. To demonstrate how this can be used, Samsung has demonstrated a reference design for a smart IoT water tank monitoring system, based on Temboo and ARTIK.

Rather than spend your time writing low-level libraries, ARTIK enables you to use the ARTIK development tools and open APIs provided by Samsung to bring wearable technology, smart devices and wireless network hubs to market more quickly, cheaply and easily. ARTIK provides a platform for developers who simply want to focus on building and testing their new IoT ideas.

And with the help of our team here at LX, we can bring your IoT device product ideas to life. From the whiteboard to the white box – we’ll partner with you to for your success. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.