All posts tagged: atmel

Creating Internet-of-Things nodes and related hardware can be a challenge, however with new hardware such as Atmel’s latest SmartConnect SAMW25 Wi-Fi module – you get a low-power, pre-certified system-on-chip solution that is aimed at the needs of embedded computing, connected appliances and Internet-of-Things applications.

This highly integrated module offers an ideal solution for designers looking to easily integrate wireless connectivity into their products using a Wi-Fi platform with FCC precertification for the module.

The SAMW25 module is based on Atmel’s industry-leading WINC1500 Wi-Fi chipset combined with a 32-bit Atmel SMART SAM D21 microcontroller on the application processor side. This provides an all-in-one- solution that opens the door to wireless LAN connectivity for a wide range of battery-powered Internet-of-Things devices and applications that require an application processor with integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, without compromising on cost or power consumption.

With a compact 34 x 15mm footprint, the module is competitive with other Wi-Fi modules on the market in terms of size, RF performance and cost – but according to Atmel this platform is particularly strong in terms of its power consumption and power-saving modes compared to similar Wi-Fi modules on the market.

The WINC1500 Wi-Fi device includes everything you need at the physical layer for 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n support at up to 72 Mbps throughput, such as an integrated power amplifier, transmit-receive switch, and advanced signal processing that provides superior sensitivity and range.

The rest of the Wi-Fi stack includes TCP/IP on board, WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption support, and support for Wi-Fi Direct, Soft-AP and station modes. The WINC1500 MAC layer is designed to minimise power consumption while also providing high data throughput.

The WINC1500 includes its own, independent 32-bit processor dedicated to the Wi-Fi networking functions. This processor provides many of the MAC functions, for example association, authentication, radio power management, security key management and frame aggregation or de-aggregation. This processor also provides flexibility for various modes of Wi-Fi operation, such as access point and station modes.

On the host microcontroller side, The SAM D21 microcontroller core runs at up to 48MHz, with 256kb embedded Flash and 32kB SRAM. This system-on-chip features convenient over-the-air Wi-Fi firmware upgrade capability, and SPI, UART and I2C interfaces.

The microcontroller is based on the ARM Cortex-M0+, building on ARM’s decades of innovation and experience in powerful yet energy-efficient microcontroller architecture.

This general-purpose microcontroller is ideal for many low-power, cost-sensitive industrial and consumer applications, running the application in one place integrated into the module alongside the Wi-Fi radio. In most cases, this system can run an Internet-connected application completely self-contained with no other microcontroller needed in the system.

A TCP/IP stack is provided onboard to handle the networking, along with DHCP and DNS network protocols and TLS (Transport-Layer Security), SSL and HTTPS support, enabling strong security in IoT networking applications. Atmel’s Wireless Simple Configuration (WSC) is also supported, making it easy to provision new devices on the network with their passwords and the like.

The microcontroller also provides a DMA and event-handling system and a full-speed USB peripheral device plus USB host. Six flexible serial communications modules are provided, along with a 12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC and a hardware touch-sensing engine.

This rich and flexible set of peripherals, combined with the energy-efficient application processor and integrated Wi-Fi radio, make this platform an ideal all-in-one solution for a range of home automation, consumer, utility metering, industrial sensing and Internet-of-Things applications.

All these features are accessible via the Atmel Studio 6 development environment, making it easy to use the SAMW25 module and easy to get started developing software for your Wi-Fi connected products and IoT applications. You don’t need to have any previous experience working with the TCP/IP stack, 802.11 networks or RF hardware design.

Atmel also offers the Atmel SAMW25 Xplained Pro evaluation kit, their wireless hardware platform to help you evaluate and develop for the ATSAMW25 Wi-Fi system-on-chip module. This kit is supported by the Atmel Studio IDE, and it provides easy access to all the features of this device, explaining how to integrate this module into your custom design.

Additional peripherals are offered in the kit, extending the features of the module and making it easier to develop your custom designs – for example a USB serial port and Serial Wire Debug support for programming and run-time debugging of your software in the onboard SAM D21 microcontroller. No other programmers or external tools are required to program or debug the device, making it easy to get up and running quickly.

And this is where the LX Group us ready to work with you. We have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

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 IoT 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.

Atmel has recently launched a new wearable computing development platform aimed at energy-efficient IoT and wearable computing applications, just in time for the influential 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

This ultra-low-power platform, based on the BTLC1000 system-on-chip, is a design-ready development board that showcases some of Atmel’s power-efficient, smart and secure devices for embedded wireless connectivity applications, as well as inertial and environmental sensors from Atmel’s technology partners.

The ATBTLC1000 SoC offers a complete hardware and software solution – making it easy to get started with the development of portable, battery-powered devices with Bluetooth Smart (Bluetooth Low Energy 4.1) connectivity – serving application areas such as wireless data logging, wearable computing, and other popular and rapidly growing IoT markets.

Atmel’s new hardware platform is one of the smallest, most power-efficient Bluetooth Smart hardware reference platforms on the market aimed at IoT and wearable applications – and it’s very easy to get started using it for evaluation and hardware or software development, with everything you need to get started provided ready-to-go.

Atmel believes this development platform provides a hardware and software ecosystem that is easy to use out-of-the-box, helping developers accelerate their product development in emerging areas such as wearable computing, personal healthcare and fitness logging devices, Bluetooth Smart IoT applications and other markets.

All of which could benefit from the powerful combination of wireless Bluetooth Smart connectivity, a powerful ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, on-board temperature, humidity and pressure sensors, a six-axis inertial measurement unit, and very efficient use of battery power.

Atmel’s Wearables Demo platform integrates the Atmel Smart SAM L21 ultra-low-power microcontroller, which uses an ARM Cortex-M0+ core, alongside Atmel’s ATBTLC1000 system-on-chip which gives the system wireless connectivity using Bluetooth Smart.

The platform also includes a capacitive touch sensor interface, hardware cryptographic and security capabilities, and a set of sensors from Atmel’s partner Bosch Sensortec. The sensors provided on the board include a BHI160 6-axis inertial measurement unit, measuring acceleration and rotation in three dimensions, and a BME280 environmental sensor which provides temperature, humidity and barometric pressure measurements.

All these hardware features are integrated into a very small reference board with dimensions of only 40 by 30 millimetres, making this reference design particularly attractive for developers working on size-critical applications such as portable and wearable devices.

Of course it’s still a valuable development platform for all kinds of IoT applications requiring Bluetooth Smart connectivity or as an evaluation platform for the ATBTLC1000 or any of the other devices featured on the board, even if the application you’re working on is not size-critical.

Atmel’s new ATBTLC1000 Bluetooth Smart chipset is available packaged in a tiny 2.2 x 2.1mm Wafer-Level Chip Scale Package, making it 25 percent smaller than the closest competing Bluetooth Smart device on the market. This enables designers to create ultra-compact designs for the next generation of Bluetooth-connected wearable devices, Internet-of-Things products and industrial applications.

Furthermore, power management is a highlight of the new platform – the Atmel Smart SAM L21 microcontroller at the heart of Atmel’s Wearable Demo platform is claimed to be the lowest-power ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller on the market, and this is combined with the industry-leading energy efficiency of the ATBTLC1000 Bluetooth Smart system-on-chip.

This makes it a perfect foundation for battery-powered IoT and wearable computing applications where strong energy efficiency and battery runtime is important but the performance of a 32-bit ARM microcontroller is also desired.

The SAM L21 has a current consumption as low as 35 microamps per MHz in active mode, and right down to 200 nanoamps in sleep mode. In fact, the power consumption of this microcontroller is so low that it can often be powered from a single lithium coin cell in some applications.

This device delivers an impressive score of 185 in the EEMBC ULPBench suite, which is an industry-standard benchmark of energy efficiency in low-power embedded devices, and this is the best score recorded for any ARM Cortex-M0+ device currently on the market.

This powerful, compact hardware platform is also backed up by a software ecosystem provided by Atmel, making it a complete development platform that allows you to very easily get started experimenting with and developing energy-efficient IoT and wearable computing applications that combine Bluetooth Smart connectivity with a powerful microcontroller, long battery life, and a range of sensors, all in a very small form factor.

To help you get started easily, the software development process is simplified through the use of Atmel Studio 7, Atmel’s flagship IDE for their microcontroller products.

This platform is also compatible with Atmel START, Atmel’s intuitive new web-based development tool for software configuration and code generation, and Atmel also has a real-time operating system available for use with the ARM chipset.

We’re excited about the possibilities with this new chipset from Atmel – and with the Internet of Things and how it can be used to create new and innovative solutions to our customers’ requirements.

Here at the LX Group we have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

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

Atmel have announced their new SmartConnect WINC1500 SoC – a wireless network controller system-on-chip platform, specifically aimed at Wi-Fi connectivity in embedded systems and Internet-of-Things applications.

The WINC1500 is part of Atmel’s SmartConnect portfolio aimed at IoT and wireless connectivity applications, which complements their existing line-up of radio-plus-microcontroller RF SoC solutions for wireless connectivity using 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, by now offering 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN connectivity for embedded and IoT applications such as smart-home appliances, home automation, wireless media streaming or industrial applications.

By using an innovative power architecture that delivers very low power consumption along with high performance, the WINC1500 can help optimise your bill of materials, minimising the number of components required to support your design.

Furthermore the WINC1500 is a great add-on platform to extend the wireless connectivity of existing microcontroller-based solutions, bringing Wi-Fi networking capability to an existing system through a UART or SPI interface to the Wi-Fi device.

The WINC1500 connects to any Atmel AVR or Atmel SMART microcontroller with minimal requirements for memory or other resources in the host microcontroller, and it supports different 801.11 modes including single-stream 802.11n with throughput up to 72 Mbps.

The WINC1500 provides internal Flash memory as well as multiple interfaces for peripheral devices, including UART, SPI and I2C, and it also includes a fully integrated power amplifier, LNA, RF transmit/receive switch and power management on the RF side, meaning that integration of the WINC1500 into your design is easy, without requiring large amounts of RF design expertise or a high external bill-of-materials cost to support this device.

The ATWINC1500 device can receive wired firmware updates via its UART, or over-the-air firmware updates. The device features 4 MBit of internal Flash memory for storing its firmware, and a provisioning mode for setup, where the device sends beacons as a soft Wi-Fi access point and can transmit or receive data at any time, using a system called Wireless Simple Configuration to make initial setup of your devices simpler.

The device supports Wi-Fi Direct, station mode and Soft-AP support, with support for either WEP or WPA2 Enterprise security modes, and offers an RF transmit power of +19 dBm with a low current consumption of 172 mA – relatively impressive for an 802.11 WiFi device in transmit mode.

A TCP/IP stack is provided on board, without the need for the host microcontroller to support this, along with DHCP/DNS network protocols and TLS (Transport Layer Security) support for secure communications.

The WINC1500 is available in a compact QFN package and requires only one external clock source, from a single crystal or oscillator, with a wide variety of reference clock frequencies between 12-32 MHz supported.

As well as the WINC1500 IC itself, in a 40-pin QFN package for board-level integration into your bespoke designs, Atmel also offers the ATWINC1500-MR210PA module. This module includes an on-board crystal, voltage regulators and other core support components, an RF balun, antenna matching network and an on-board antenna, along with a shielding can.

This module makes it very easy to get started integrating the WINC1500 into your design, with minimal design effort or RF layout expertise required. The ATWINC1500-MR210PA module also offers module-level pre-certification of the RF system for regulatory agencies such as the FCC, making it easier to get your product approved and to market without much RF engineering expertise.

As with Atmel’s other microcontroller products, you can easily get started evaluating and designing with the ATWINC1500 low-cost, low-power WiFi network controller by using Atmel’s starter kit for this device, the ATWINC1500-XSTK Xplained Pro platform.

This kit provides the hardware and software platform you need to get started with easy access to the features of the ATWINC1500 and explains how to integrate the device in a custom design, with an on-board embedded debugger and support in the Atmel Studio integrated development platform, with standardised compatibility with the rest of Atmel’s Xplained Pro ecosystem of development tools.

No extra tools are necessary to program or debug the host microcontroller, but the Xplained Pro development system does offer additional peripherals to extend the features of the board and ease the development of custom designs.

Included in the kit is a SAMD21 Xplained Pro board, as the host microcontroller, along with an ATWINC1500 Xplained Pro extension board, which includes an ATWINC1500-MR210PA, shielded and approved RF module and an Atmel I/01 Xplained Pro board which provides sensor inputs to the host microcontroller along with a micro-SD card.

There is an embedded debugger for programming the SAMD21 host microcontroller, Atmel’s Data Gateway Interface (DGI) for connectivity between the host microcontroller and the WiFi platform over either TWI or SPI, a USB virtual-serial-port interface to the host microcontroller’s UART for debugging, an Atmel CryptoAuthentication device connected to the host microcontroller, and a range of application examples supported through the Atmel Gallery.

Together, this development pack provides a powerful but easy-to-use combination of tools you can use to quickly get started prototyping or developing a WiFi-networked, Internet-connected sensor network device or Internet-of-Things appliance based on the WINC1500.

After the explosion of the Expressif ESP8266 into the marketplace last year, we consider this to be Atmel’s reply to the inexpensive SoC from China – and look forward to further announcements from other manufacturers with their responses. Which leads to more options in the marketplace to choose from = each with their own pros and cons to your specific application.

If your team is looking for help moving forward with your own Wi-Fi or IoT-based devices – we invite you to join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

One of the latest and most power-efficient 32-bit microcontroller options on the market today is Atmel’s new SAM L21 MCU family, specifically aimed at power-efficient battery powered devices in wireless sensor networks and the accelerating Internet-of-Things market.

The Atmel SMART SAM L21 family, based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ core, boasts ultra-efficient current consumption as low as 35 micro amps per MHz with the chip in active mode and as low as 200 nano amps in the deepest sleep mode.

This best-in-class power efficiency is said to have the potential to “extend battery life from years to decades” in power-optimised sensor network and Internet-of-Things applications. These chips draw less than 1 micro amp with full SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar running, making the SAM L21 family the lowest-power Cortex-M based microcontroller solution on the market.

With a 42 MHz Cortex-M0+ core, which is the smallest 32-bit ARM core, 256 kB of flash memory and up to 40 kB of SRAM, these chips obviously aren’t intended to compete with high-end mobile processors in terms of performance. However, these small, power-efficient microcontrollers are still powerful enough to support touch interfaces, AES encryption, and wireless communications – for example running both the application and wireless stacks in a typical wireless end-node IoT application.

Also included is up to 8 kB of separate low-power SRAM that is kept powered at everything short of the deepest sleep mode – even off a low-power backup battery when the main battery is exhausted. The Cortex-M0+ is a fairly modest embedded ARM core in terms of its relative performance – it’s an optimised version of the Cortex-M0, with one less pipeline stage to reduce power consumption and with a few features from the more capable Cortex-M3 and M4 families also added.

The SAM L21 is the lowest-power Cortex-M0+ based device family presently on the market, and it expands Atmel’s product offering beyond the SAM D family, aimed at the next generation of ultra-low-power embedded devices.

Among the updated peripherals included on the L21 is a low-power capacitive touch-sensing controller, for touch-sensitive surfaces such as buttons, sliders or wheels. The capacitive touch peripheral can run in all low-power operating modes, and supports waking up the microcontroller from sleep when the sensors are touched.

Architectural innovations in the SAM L21 family enable low-power peripherals such as timers, serial communications and the touch controller to remain powered up and running as needed while the rest of the system is in a reduced-power sleep mode.

Nearly every peripheral system has been optimised for energy efficiency and for the ability to operate in a standalone mode without the entire chip being powered up and active. The energy-efficient L21 design goes much further than simply turning off clock distribution to the various peripheral devices on the chip when they are powered down – it completely shuts down the power to peripherals and segments of the die that are not currently in use.

The SAM L21 supports energy-efficient “sleepwalking”, which allows peripheral devices to request a clock source when they need to wake up from sleep modes and perform tasks – without having to power up the CPU, the Flash and other relatively power-intensive CPU support systems.

As an example of a real-world energy-efficient Internet-of-Things application, suppose the chip’s internal ADC is used to measure temperature in a room. You can put the CPU to sleep and wake up periodically on interrupts from the real-time clock, providing very efficient power consumption. The measured temperature can be checked against a predefined threshold to decide on further action, and if no action is required the CPU can be put back to sleep until the next interrupt is fired from the RTC at the interval desired.

During an analogue sensor read, the ADC clock will only be enabled and running when the ADC conversion is needed. When the ADC receives the trigger event from the real time clock it will request its generic clock from the generic clock controller, and this peripheral clock will stop as soon as the ADC conversion is completed.

The event system is configured to send this event from the real-time clock to the ADC, and the ADC is configured to start a conversion when it receives an event – but this is done without the need to power up the CPU at all, minimising the power budget. However, the ADC can be configured to look at its reading, check if a certain threshold is exceeded, and to generate an interrupt for a different task – waking up the CPU for example, if we decide that data logging, radio transmission or some other CPU action is needed in response to an extreme temperature value.

As with most of Atmel’s microcontroller products, Atmel is offering an Xplained Pro evaluation board for the SAM L21 microcontroller family. This evaluation board features an on-board debugger, standardised extension connectors compatible with the other expansion boards and modules in the Atmel Xplained development board ecosystem, and auto-identification in Atmel Studio.

Along with the rest of Atmel’s development tools and boards, this evaluation board is powerful and flexible yet easy to use, for both professional and hobbyist-level developers.

Using the SAM L21 Xplained Pro board and Atmel Studio, designers can monitor power consumption in conjunction with the program counter in real time, and if a spike in power consumption appears you can loop back to see what’s causing it in the software and code accordingly.

Thanks to Atmel your new or existing Internet of Things devices can increase their autonomy and allow you to reduce device size and weight thanks to the use of smaller battery capacities – and of course saving you money as well. If this is of interest to you – and why wouldn’t it be – here at the LX Group we have the team, experience and technology to bring your ideas to life.

Getting started is easy – join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

Atmel has recently expanded its SmartConnect wireless connectivity portfolio with the announcement of a series of new, turnkey 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi system-on-chips and modules which are aimed at enabling expanded possibilities in Internet-of-Things, home or building automation and smart energy management as well as smart, connected consumer electronics applications.

The Atmel SmartConnect Wi-Fi family is a range of self-contained, low-power and pre-certified system-on-chips and modules which bring 802.11 wireless LAN connectivity – and access to the Internet – to any embedded system.

These integrated modules offer a great solution for designers seeking to integrate Wi-Fi connectivity without any existing engineering experience with 802.11, real-time operating systems, IP stack concepts nor RF electronics.

Aimed at opening the emerging “Internet of Things”, Atmel’s SmartConnect Wi-Fi portfolio is ready to be integrated in a vast array of battery-powered devices and applications requiring the integration of WLAN connectivity without compromising on cost and power consumption.

Although an active 802.11 radio is more power hungry than some other RF connectivity standards such as Bluetooth Low Energy or 802.15.4/6LoWPAN – the familiarity and existing ubiquitous infrastructure built around the 802.11 wireless LAN standard makes it an attractive choice for many applications, avoiding the need for extra hubs, gateways or cables to be installed to get your devices connected to the Internet.

Atmel’s Wi-Fi system-on-chips are optimised for applications requiring energy efficiency, such as battery-powered devices, with a wide 1.8V to 3.6V supply voltage range, a deep-sleep-mode with less than 20 micro amps of current draw and an architecture that allows for instant switching of the radio on or off or into a sleep state without startup delays.

This allows for battery-powered devices such as portable nodes in wireless sensor networks to be connected to the Internet whilst still retaining extremely good energy efficiency, staying in a sleep state most of the time, waking up several times per day for a moment to collect sensor values and send this data to a server on the Internet before going back to sleep.

Atmel’s SMART SAMW23 Wi-Fi modules are based on Atmel’s low-power Wi-Fi System-on-Chip technology, incorporating WiFi along with an ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller core – a fully integrated single-source microcontroller-plus-Wi-Fi radio solution compatible with Atmel Studio 6 and capable of supporting network-connected battery-powered network nodes with a battery lifetime up to years, on a single chip.

This turnkey system provides an integrated software solution, which incorporates application and security protocols such as TLS, an integrated TCP/IP stack and other network services along with a standard real-time operating system.

To help you accelerate your development of these kinds of Wi-Fi connected embedded sensor networks and other Internet-of-Things applications, Atmel will be making the SAMW23 Wi-Fi system-on-chip available on one of Atmel’s standard Atmel Xplained evaluation boards which will be able to plug into any other Atmel Xplained Pro microcontroller evaluation board.

Getting started with coding is helped by the SmartConnect library provided by Atmel for use with their SmartConnect range of Wi-Fi hardware – a turnkey software framework that is available for you to use in Atmel Studio 6. It removes the need to understand the Wi-Fi stack, enabling designers to focus on the functionality and user experience of their product.

The Atmel ATWINC1500/ATWILC1000 SmartConnect system-on-chip is a family of IEEE802.11b/g/n network controller and link controller targeted at Internet-of-Things applications, providing valuable solutions for add-on WiFi connectivity in existing microcontroller solutions and product designs, bringing wireless LAN connectivity to your embedded device through a serial UART or SPI interface.

The WINC1500/WILC1000 chipsets connect to any Atmel AVR or SMART microcontroller with minimal resource requirements, and in their most advanced mode of operation these chips support single-stream 1×1 802.11n connectivity providing up to 72 Mbps PHY throughput.

Both devices feature a fully-integrated RF power amplifier, LNA, RF switch and power management system and provide internal Flash memory as well as multiple peripheral interfaces including UART, SPI and I2C.

For the serious enthusiast or less-technical developers, the Arduino team in collaboration with Atmel have recently announced the launch of the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 – an Arduino shield based around the new Atmel ATWINC1500 802.11 network controller, which enables rapid prototyping of wireless, Internet-connected Internet-of-Things applications on the popular open-source Arduino development platform at a relatively low cost.

This cost-effective and secure new Arduino Wi-Fi shield is an easy-to-use extension that can seamlessly be connected to any Arduino board, enabling high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity, giving the Arduino design and developer community more opportunities to securely connect Internet-of-Things applications ranging from consumer appliances to wearable electronics, robotics, or countless other applications where wireless network connectivity is desirable.

And thanks to the open-source nature of the Arduino team’s projects, some leverage can be gained for your own products if using the same open-source licensing model. However the new Atmel wireless platform holds great promise for developers of IoT-enabled hardware. And that includes the engineering team here at the LX Group – who can bring your ideas to life.

Getting started is easy – join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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