All posts tagged: development

Next in our series examining emerging power-efficient wireless chipsets, we examine the ANT technology. It’s a wireless sensor network technology that defines a protocol stack for use with small, embedded system-on-chip radios operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. ANT provides power-efficient operation for battery-powered wireless devices, low overhead in the communications link, interference tolerance and worldwide ISM spectrum compatibility.

Similar in some respects to Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4, ANT is aimed at applications in wireless connected, networked devices for health, sports, home automation and industrial control applications.

Whilst ANT has some similarities to Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4, there are some differences. For example, the ANT physical layer supports an on-the-air data rate of up to 1 MBit/s, compared to 250 kbit/s for IEEE 802.15.4 operating at 2.4 GHz.

This means that an ANT system needs to stay on the air for a shorter amount of time to transmit a given amount of data as compared to an 802.15.4 system. Another noteworthy difference is that the ANT protocol is proprietary – whilst ANT transceiver chips are available from some manufacturers such as Nordic Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, these ANT-protocol transceivers are basically “black boxes” of proprietary hardware and firmware which are interfaced to an external user application processor over a UART, SPI or USB interface.

Similar to IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Low Energy systems, ANT systems can be configured to spend long periods in a low-power “sleep” mode with a current consumption on the order of microamps, wake up briefly to communicate, with a peak current consumption on the order of 10 milliamps during active transmission, and then return to sleep mode. At low message rates the average current consumption can be less than 60 microamps on some typical devices.

ANT-based wireless sensor network nodes are capable of acting as either masters or slaves within the network, that is, acting as transmitters, receivers or transceivers as required to route data where it needs to go within the network whilst also minimising the power consumption of each node. For example, the RF transmitter of a given node is powered down if that particular node only needs to receive at given time. Every node is capable of determining when to transmit based on the activity of its neighbours.

Due to the low power requirement the ANT system has been relatively widely adopted in the athletics and sports sector, particularly for fitness and performance monitoring. ANT transceivers are embedded in equipment such as heart rate monitors, speed and cadence sensors for athletics, blood pressure and blood glucose monitors, pulse oximeters and temperature sensors. Examples of existing commercial product lines employing ANT technology include Nike’s performance monitoring products as well as the Garmin Edge range of cycling computers.

Furthermore, ANT+ is an extension of the ANT protocol which adds interoperability between devices – allowing for the standardised networking of different ANT devices to facilitate the collection and interpretation of sensor data from multiple sources. For example, ANT+ enabled fitness devices such as heart rate monitors and pedometers can have all their data collated together and assembled into performance metrics, allowing a more holistic view of the user’s fitness and performance based on multiple data types.

Three types of message transmission can be accommodated by the ANT protocol – broadcast, acknowledged and burst. Broadcast messaging is one-way message communication from one node to another, where the receiving node transmits no acknowledgement. This type of message is suited to sensor-network applications and is the most power-efficient mode of operation.

Acknowledgement of each received data packet can also be transmitted by the receiving node, in acknowledged message mode, although there are no retransmissions. This mode of operation is well suited to control and automation applications where accidental transmission of a duplicate control or actuation message should be avoided. Burst messaging mode may also be employed, where multiple messages are transmitted using the full data bandwidth.

The receiving node acknowledges receipt of each packet, which is sequence numbered for traceability, and informs the transmitting node of any corrupted packets which are then retransmitted. This mode is suited to data transfer where the overall integrity of the data needs to be maintained.

ANT employs a mechanism to ensure RF coexistence in the relatively congested 2.4 GHz ISM spectrum that is different from from the spread spectrum mechanisms employed by 802.11, 802.15.4 and Bluetooth networks. This time-based multiplexing scheme provides the ability for each transmission to occur in an interference-free time slot within the defined band. The radio transmits for less than 150 microseconds for each message, allowing a single channel to be subdivided into hundreds of time slots.

This is an adaptive, isochronous scheme, meaning that it doesn’t require a master clock synchronising every device. Each device starts broadcasting at regular intervals, but then modifies its transmission timing if another device is transmitting in that particular time division. This allows ANT to adapt to a congested RF environment whilst also ensuring that there is no overhead when interference is not present, minimising power consumption whist maintaining a high level of network integrity.

In a very congested RF environment, if this time-division scheme is not sufficient, ANT does have the capability for frequency agility, allowing a frequency hop to an alternative 1 MHz wide channel and then going back to time-sharing coexistence. This frequency-hopping is controlled by the application processor that controls the ANT chip.

Although a broad overview, the ANT system can be thought of as a useful and reliable method of data communication between devices with limited power supply and used in areas of high RF congestion – especially idea for consumer devices. And if this meets your needs but you’re not sure how to progress with a reliable implementation, we can partner with you to take care of this either in revisions of existing products or as part of new designs.

With our experience in retail and commercial products we have the ability to target your product’s design to the required end-user market and all the steps required to make it happen.

We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – 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. https://lx-group.com.au

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

Recently Google announced their new Cloud Platform services, which allow almost anyone to build applications, websites, store and analyse data using Google’s infrastructure. This is an exciting development for those looking to implement a scalable Internet-of-things system at a minimal cost – so we’ll take an overview of the system as it stands today.

Almost everyone is aware of the researched information, computing power and infrastructure available for Google’s myriad of services, and now it’s possible to harness some of this for your own needs. With the introduction of their “Cloud Platform”, you can harness this power that Google has used internally for years to provide Google’s familiar high-speed, high-scale big-data products and services such as Search, YouTube, Google Docs and GMail and make it available as cloud computing services for use with your own Internet-of-Things projects.

Large-scale, high-speed, distributed “cloud” storage and computation with large amounts of data is at the heart of everything that makes Google what it is, so it’s clear that they have substantial opportunities to offer external cloud-computing customers.

Whilst Google is not the first major player in the cloud computing market, their substantial infrastructure and “Big Data” experience represents a significant source of potential competition with other established cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services. The capability to use Google’s data centre infrastructure for cloud storage and computation, their data tools such as BigQuery to process very large scale data sets – and integration with Google’s data, services and apps are increasingly attractive.

The Google Cloud Platform is made up of a couple of different core components – Compute and Storage being two of the most important. The Compute component includes the Google Compute Engine, which is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform designed to run any application on top of Google’s infrastructure – which offers fast networking, scalable processing and storage, and the App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications. The Storage component includes Google Cloud Storage and the BigQuery large-scale query system.

As with most cloud computing platforms, end users access cloud-based applications and infrastructure through a relatively lightweight local computer – via a web browser, lightweight desktop software, or a mobile device application – with the data and most of the software are stored on remote servers in the cloud. Therefore, the hardware requirements for the user to leverage the power of applications and data on Google Cloud Platform-hosted applications and services are almost trivial.

Many components of the Google Cloud Platform support open standards and protocols such as REST-based APIs. The Google Compute Engine is built atop a JSON RESTful API which
can be accessed via numerous different libraries, command-line utilities and GUI front-end tools. Google’s BigQuery, a cloud-based fully managed interactive query service specifically designed for work with massive datasets, is operated via an SQL-like query language.

Google Cloud Storage complements the Compute component of the Google Cloud Platform and serves to glue together all Google Cloud Services. Google Cloud Storage is a HTTP service that serves data directly over HTTP with high performance and resumable transfers of objects up to the terabyte scale. It offers support for two different APIs – one that is compatible with the XML standard used by competing providers such as Amazon Web Services and another API built around JSON and OAuth, consistent with the Google Compute Engine’s API.

The Google App Engine is a “Platform-as-a-Service” cloud computing platform for the development and hosting of web applications in Google’s managed data centres. Applications are sand-boxed and distributed across multiple servers. One of the major benefits of using the Google App Engine is that it can offer automatic scaling for web applications – that is, automatically allocating more resources for the web application to handle the increased demand as the number of requests for a particular application increases.

All that sounds quite useful, however why would your organisation use the Google Cloud Platform? Whilst it requires an initial investment to import your data (especially on a large scale) into the cloud, this is offset by the substantial advantages offered by the platform. By offering fully managed services that remove the requirement for upfront capacity planning, provisioning, constant monitoring and planning software updates. This can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of large-scale data handling solutions.

Furthermore there’s one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart – the network that connects the company’s data centres so data can be processed and delivered where it is needed in milliseconds. Google has a private distributed backbone between all its data centres – so if you’re moving data around within Google’s cloud, even within geographically diverse data centres (although this is essentially invisible to the user) your data travels over Google’s backbone, and not over the Internet – providing substantially improved performance.

Whilst the Compute and Storage components of the Google Cloud Platform are separate offerings, the performance of Google’s networks make it appear as though they integrated seamlessly, thus allowing integration of Google’s cloud storage and computation with no obvious slowdown.

At the LX Group we have a wealth of experience and expertise in the IoT field, and can develop new or modify existing hardware and software to integrate your system with the Google Cloud Platform. As always, our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

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

People and organisations have backgrounds in many fields, and being an expert in one of those will likely generate the seed of an idea – which can be developed into what may be a commercially-successful product. However being an expert in one particular field does not make them the master of all.

This is very true when the decision to develop a product is made. With the advent of crowdfunding, accessible design tools, one-off machine shops and laser-cutting houses, inexpensive PCB production and the wealth of “experience” published on the Internet – almost anyone can be easily convinced that they too can bring an idea from concept to delivered product.

However this form of readily-accessible tools and knowledge doesn’t immediately allow an individual or organisation become competent overnight, just like reading a book on eye surgery doesn’t turn you into an optometrist. Thus when considering turning your ideas into a product – are you equipped for the challenges of product development?

Let’s examine the major stages of the design process and consider just a few points with regards to what is necessary.

Conceptual Development
This involves many tasks including product and market research, developing final product specifications, prototype creation and more. If designing your first product, do you have the discipline to finalise the specifications and avoid feature creep? Is your design cost-effective? Without a wide knowledge of parts and suppliers you could miss out on finding a single component or module that could replace a whole sub-section of your design.

The Design Process
This involves multiple iterations of your product, both hardware (and software if it uses embedded technology). This could involve large initial capital outlay to bring in the required development tools for hardware and software, test equipment and more. Choosing the appropriate tools alone can be a nightmare, and leave you at the mercy of vendors or fast-talking sales people. Finally the time required to design, test, incorporate feedback and redesign can be more than you expect, as each iteration is a learning process in itself. The more time you spend, the more time you’re giving your competition to succeed.

Testing, Verification and Certification
Your new product must meet a variety of compliance standards for mains power use, RF emissions, accuracy, perhaps environmental factors such as withstanding levels of vibration and temperatures, and more. This will require incredibly specialised testing equipment and the services of an external laboratory. Furthermore you may need multiple examples of the product at this stage for external user testing and feedback, again requiring short-run manufacturing expertise that doesn’t stretch the budget.

Pre-production Manufacture
If you’re working on your first product, this stage will seem like a complete nightmare. After finding a manufacturer you can trust, and setting up your component supply chain, developing tooling and test jigs for the assembly line (with most of this likely to be in the Far East) you may be running out of time, budget or nerves as you deal with suppliers, manufacturers and designers in more than one language and time-zone.

Manufacturing
Although an extreme amount of work and effort brings your organisation to this stage – manufacturing is not a hands-free effort. It requires quality control, supply-chain and product delivery management; and after some product examples have been released the opportunity to make small changes to the product based on customer feedback. This may require revisiting the previous stage of the design process and the efforts within. For higher-volume production you may need to keep staff on-site with the contracted factory to oversee manufacturing and ensure the design has not been altered to find relevant cost-savings for the manufacturer that could affect the outcome of your design.

Ongoing Support
After experiencing the processes to this point, you’ve reached a somewhat simpler part of your product’s development cycle. By now you’re an expert in your product, how it works, operates and can be used to it’s maximum. However you can’t rest on your laurels, as constant customer feedback and market forces will require you to update the product when necessary.

So why do all that yourself? You could invest in the physical and human resources required to bring your first idea to life – at a great initial expense, and hope for the best. Or you could instead take your design to a team of experts in the product design and manufacturing business – who can understand your product idea and turn it into a finished product on time and on budget.

Here at the LX Group we can take your design ideas and produce the required customised solution for your team, or even follow through to final completion, including documentation, standards compliance and revisions.

To move forward with your design requirements on time and on budget, simply contact us for a 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.

So you have an idea – the “next big thing” in the technology or consumer electronics area. You may have developed it alone, or with a group of friends or colleagues. Over many sleepless nights and busy weekends it was developed into a working example. Or your small company worked on it non-stop. You overcame the design challenges, early bugs and faults. Now you’re at the stage where the prototypes are performing as required and you know it’s ready to convert into a product.

At this juncture the project may have hit the largest stopping point there could be – funding and commercialisation. More money is required to further development, however as an individual, small group or business there’s no way the bank will lend you the money. Furthermore with almost everyone “feeling the pinch” you don’t want to ask family or friends.

However there is a solution – “Crowdfunding”. Until recently crowdfunding was unheard of, but like most great ideas has spread like wildfire and is now a legitimate form of fund-raising for great projects. How it works is very simple – you describe your new product in as much detail as possible, showing the features and benefits just like any other sales tool.

However you then offer people the ability to pay in advance to either sponsor or back the product development and purchase the final product. You will set in advance a goal amount. Different monetary amounts are set, each with a ‘reward’ of the product and other extras – and the higher the amount, the greater the reward. At this point is is supremely important to accurately state the delivery date. People will wait if they know when to expect their product. These amounts are pledged, and not received unless the financial goal amount has been met at a set cut-off date.

If the total amounts pledged fall short of the goal amount, the project remains unfunded and you’re back to try again. However – if the goal is met – the backers funds’ are transferred to your organisation, less a fee by the crowdfunding facilitator. And this is when the next challenge arises – bringing the product to market.

For inspiration, two recent examples of crowdfunding success were developed locally here in Australia. The first of these is “Ninja Blocks”, a hardware and cloud-based solution to interface all sorts of objects interactively with the Internet. Their goal was $24000 however ended up receiving just over $100000. The product captured the imagination and enthusiasm of so many people the founders have had a second round of VC funding.

Another is a current project – the “LIFX Light Bulb”. It’s an RGB LED energy-efficient light bulb that can be controlled via wifi and therefore an Internet-connected device. Although the end date hasn’t been reached, and the goal is $100000 – they have already received over one million dollars in backing.

As you can see – with the right product, pricing and promotion – crowdfunding can be a raging success. However before moving forward and examining further development, who are these crowdfunding facilitators?

The largest and most popular is known as Kickstarter. Based in the United States, they have a huge range of products and projects being funded. If you need to reach a global audience, this would be the facilitator to consider. They collect the pledges via the Amazon payment system and capture a small percentage, around five to ten percent. But there is one drawback – projects must be based in the United States. However this can usually be worked around by having a representative in the US who can act on your behalf.

Another choice is Pozible, although not as large as Kickstarter they’re based locally which makes the process so much easier. However as a domestic facilitator you may not reach the global audience due to foreigner trust issues and being far from the majority of the target market.

Back to your project – let’s say you’ve successfully gained your funding. Where to next? You could be staring a huge bank balance, a prototype on your desk and have several thousand people waiting for their reward. Do you understand the processes of taking a design from prototype to actual manufacture? Perhaps it could be redesigned for a cheaper cost price – not only components but making it cheaper to make. And where will you have it made? Locally? You’ve heard about how cheap it is to offshore to East Asia – but who do you contact? Who can you trust? Do you feel confident sending your designs and a large payment offshore – hoping everything will work out? Or do you have the time, knowledge, language skills and savvy to research in country?

If the answer to even one of those questions is “no” – to ensure success you need a partner who understands your product, will take the time to work together with you from your initial contact right through to delivering the final products to your backers. That is where you can take advantage of our experience and success to bring your product to market.

LX has experience in successfully taking electronic products from concept through the commercialisation process. There are many factors to consider before commencing product development and LX can provide expert advice throughout the process, lowering your commercial risk.

Some of the services offered by LX include:

Development of business cases and business plans
Competitor research and analysis
Evaluation of proposed solutions
Intellectual Property (IP) landscaping
Market research and feasibility studies
Rapid market testing
Surveys and focus groups
Development of marketing strategies
Starting a business – LX Business Quick-Start pack
Assistance in raising funding (investment and government grants)
Product versioning strategies and technology road mapping

For more information or a 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.