All posts tagged: Hardware

ThingWorx is a relatively new offering in the Internet-of-Things platform space, offering an Internet-of-Things and Machine-to-Machine application platform which promises very fast application development, scalability, search ability and integration with other data sources such as social media, all in a complete development and runtime platform for rapidly developing sophisticated IoT and M2M applications.

The platform provides all the necessary functionality required to get your solution to market quickly and easily. Let’s take a quick look at what the ThingWorx platform promises for Internet-of-Things developers and engineers.

ThingWorx enables rapid creation of “smart” end-to-end Internet of Things applications, when used in conjunction with hardware from various vendors, for a wide range of application markets such as smart agriculture, telematics, healthcare, “smart cities”, energy efficiency, utility metering and building automation.

The platform is aimed at the building and running of the applications of a “connected world”, reducing the time to market, cost and risk associated with building innovative Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine applications through the use of ThingWorx’s model-based design and search-based intelligence.

Furthermore, data can be integrated from a multitude of different devices, machines and sensors that make up the “Internet of Things”, collecting, tagging and relating the resulting “Big Data” of different types, creating an operational data store that becomes more valuable over time as the quantity of data and the density of relationships within that data set increases.

ThingWorx collects, tags and relates the unstructured, transactional and time-based “data exhaust” from networks of Internet-connected sensors and devices as well as data from human collaboration, such as from social media for example. This enables your team to create dynamic Internet of Things applications that evolve rapidly as new inputs and insights become available.

Dynamic applications of this kind become more valuable the more they are used and the more data they accumulate, with that data serving as a catalyst for innovation. The ThingWorx environment includes ThingWorx Composer, a unified, model-based development environment aimed at compressing the design-develop-deploy cycle, reducing time to market and spurring easier innovation.

In addition, ThingWorx also offers their “Mashup Builder”, aimed at enabling rapid assembly of applications that integrate the data, activities and events from people, systems and the physical world, in an easily accessible “zero-code” tool that is claimed to offer developers, analysts and business users the ability to create HTML5-based user experiences, analytics and dashboards in minutes, greatly expanding the accessibility of the creation and customisation of these sorts of systems.

Composer is an end-to-end application modelling environment designed to help you easily build the unique applications of an Internet-of-Things enabled world. Composer makes it easy to model the things, business logic, visualisation, data storage, collaboration, and security required for a connected application.

The “drag and drop” Mashup Builder empowers developers and business users to rapidly create rich, interactive applications, real-time dashboards, collaborative workspaces and mobile interfaces without the need for coding experience.

This next-generation application builder reduces development time and produces high quality, scalable connected applications which allow companies to accelerate the pace at which they can deliver value-added solutions for working with Internet-of-Things data.

ThingWorx’s SQUEAL (Search, Query and Analysis) intelligence tool empowers users to search the data from people, systems and machines in their Internet-of-Things world to find what they want when they want, bringing search to the world of connected devices and distributed data.

With SQUEAL’s interactive search capabilities, users can now correlate data that delivers answers to key business questions. Pertinent and related collaboration data, line-of-business system records, and equipment data get returned in a single search, speeding problem resolution and enabling innovation.

As you can imagine, ThingWorx lets you deploy their service in exactly the way you want to to meet your needs – from deployment in the cloud to local on-premises deployment, federated or embedded deployment.

ThingWorx relies on a significant network of partner companies provide ThingWorx-approved compatible hardware and firmware solutions for Internet-of-Things applications and wireless sensor networks, while ThingWorx itself focuses exclusively on the software platform.

The growing ecosystem of hardware, software and service partners surrounding ThingWorx can be leveraged to allow more rapid innovation in a ThingWorx-based environment, including access to a huge range of sensor hardware and wireless devices to suit diverse needs.

If your organisation is considering the ThingWorx plaftorm – or other systems, our engineers are equipped with the tools and experience to bring your ideas to life. To get started, 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.

When it comes to developing Internet-of-things systems, a lot of public focus is placed on the hardware and networking infrastructure required to make it a physical reality. However when designing a system, the processing and analysis of collected data requires an equal or increased effort – and anything that can make this easier or more cost-efficient is necessary.

One example of efficient data processing for the Internet-of-things can be provided by the Amazon Kinesis – a new managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale, adding big-data services to the Amazon Web Services line-up.

Kinesis can collect and process hundreds of terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, allowing you to write applications that process information in real time from all sorts of different data sources.

Data can be harvested from almost anything- such as sensors and instruments, user interfaces, or other sources of data. Let’s take a quick look at Kinesis and its potential role in Internet-of-Things applications.

Kinesis service accepts real-time data, replicates it and delivers it to applications running on Amazon’s cloud, allowing applications to tap big data in real time. Real-time operations on large amounts of data made possible by Kinesis enable you to collect and analyse information in real-time, answering questions about the current state of your data without waiting.

With Kinesis, developers can get more creative about what to do with large amounts of data flowing in live, and developers building applications on Amazon’s cloud services can now more easily take advantage of sensors collecting data, which is an important development for realising the potential of large-scale analytics on data collected from Internet-of-Things networks.

This certainly makes Amazon Web Services an attractive choice for developers seeking to put large scale data collected from sensor networks to work in the cloud.

The system can be scaled elastically for real-time processing of streaming data on a large or small scale, taking in large streams of data records that can be consumed in real time by multiple data-processing applications running on instances of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Data-processing Kinesis applications use the Amazon Kinesis Client Library, and these applications can read data from the Kinesis stream and perform real-time processing on the data they read. The processed records can be emitted to dashboards, used to used to generate alerts, or emit data to a variety of other Amazon big data services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), or Amazon Redshift.

Interoperability and compatibility with existing, established Amazon cloud computing services and products is an important factor which is likely to give the uptake and usability of Kinesis a significant advantage for established Amazon Web Services users. Kinesis applications can also emit data into another Kinesis stream, enabling more complex data processing.

With Kinesis applications, you can build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, output data to drive user interactions, and output data to Amazon S3, DynamoDB or other cloud computing services.

Kinesis makes it possible to respond to changes in your data stream in seconds, at any data scale – for example, in Internet of Things applications, such a response may take the form of activating a certain device or automation system in a specified way.

You can create a new stream, set the throughput requirements, and start streaming data quickly and easily. Kinesis automatically provisions and manages the storage required to reliably and durably collect your data stream.

Kinesis will scale up or down based on your needs, seamlessly scaling to match the data throughput rate and volume of your data, from megabytes to terabytes per hour.

This allows your systems to reliably collect, process, and transform all of your data in real-time before delivering it to data stores of your choice, where it can be used by existing or new applications. Connectors enable integration with Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Kinesis provides developers with client libraries that enable the design and operation of real-time data processing applications – a new class of big data applications which can continuously analyze data at any volume and throughput in real time.

Kinesis is cost effective for workloads of any scale – you can pay as you go, and you will only pay for the resources you use, like with other Amazon cloud computing services. Initiall you can start by provisioning low-throughput streams, and only pay a low hourly rate for the throughput you need.

Kinesis enables sophisticated streaming data processing, because one Kinesis application may emit Kinesis stream data into another Kinesis stream. Near-real-time aggregation of data enables processing logic that can extract complex key performance indicators and metrics from that data.

Complex data-processing graphs can be generated by emitting data from multiple Kinesis applications to another Kinesis stream for downstream processing by a different Kinesis application. You can use data ingested into Kinesis for simple data analysis, real-time metrics and reporting in real time.

For example, metrics and reporting for system and application logs ingested into the Kinesis stream are available in real time, allowing data-processing application logic to work on such data as it is streaming in, rather than wait for data bunches to be sent to the data-processing applications later.

Data can be taken into Kinesis streams, helping to ensure ensure durability and elasticity. The delay between the time a record is added to the stream and the time it can be retrieved is less than 10 seconds – in other words, Kinesis applications can start consuming the data from the stream less than 10 seconds after the data is added – this is useful in applications where real-world actuation or control of automation devices needs to happen relatively quickly.

By using such a powerful and scalable system such as Kinesis, you can get the power you need without paying for surplus processing capacity – but still have reserves ready on demand. But how to get started with Kinesis and your Internet-of-things plans?

Simply 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.

Without too much fanfare another Internet-of-Things platform has been introduced to the market which deserves some exploration. Called XOBXOB (pronounced “zob-zob”), it is claimed to provide users with an easy to use Internet platform for building distributed networks of devices that communicate with the Internet and with each other.

XOBXOB is aimed particularly at ease of use in conjunction with Arduino or Arduino-compatible platforms, providing a cloud service for “Simple Internet for Things” in conjunction with the Arduino environment.

XOBXOB can be used in conjunction with an Arduino or compatible and Ethernet Shield, a Roving Networks WiFly module, or any Arduino-compatible hardware connected to a PC. If you don’t have any appropriate Ethernet or Wi-Fi connected hardware suitable for use with XOBXOB then the Arduino can use a downloadable “Connector”.

This is a small application from XOBXOB, available for Windows, Linux or OSX, which provides Internet connectivity between the XOBXOB service and your microcontroller board via your PC, without requiring the use of embedded Ethernet or Wi-Fi hardware.

Getting started with XOBXOB requires a physical thing, like an Arduino, or a virtual thing, like a web browser running on a smartphone or PC. Although you can get started with only one thing, XOBXOB is more interesting to get started with if you have multiple things that can talk to each other via XOBXOB, such as both an Arduino and a smartphone.

Although it’s easiest to get started with XOBXOB using an Arduino, you do not have to use an Arduino. More experienced users can use XOBXOB’s RESTful API to implement XOBXOB connectivity for essentially any device that can connect to the Internet.

Furthermore, the XOBXOB team continues to work on libraries and sample projects to make it easy to use other popular embedded computing platforms and single-board computers such as BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi.

Once you’ve got suitable hardware, you can register for an account on the XOBXOB website and get the private API token from your XOBXOB dashboard. You’ll also need to download and install the XOBXOB Arduino library.

XOBXOB makes it very easy to get started by including simple examples in the XOBXOB Arduino sketch library, such as a basic Internet-connected LED control program, using the XOBXOB service to control a LED (or any digital device) remotely via the Web.

These basic examples provide a quick way to test the network connectivity between your Arduino, your LAN and the Internet. When getting started with a XOBXOB Arduino sketch, remember that you’ll need to put your private XOBXOB API token (available via the XOBXOB dashboard) and the MAC address of your Ethernet device into the Arduino sketch.

There are three different libraries to use, depending on whether you’re using an Ethernet-equipped Arduino, a WiFly-equipped Arduino, or an Arduino connected to a PC with the Connector software.

With this example, you can then use the on/off panel on the XOBXOB dashboard to set the state of the LED on or off, and then click “SET”. You can also do a “GET” to retrieve the status of the digital output, which is useful if multiple users are controlling the state of the system. These kinds of set and get methods are likely to be familiar to users with some Java or other object-oriented programming experience.

More advanced example code is also included, for example to allow you to demonstrate Internet-connected control of a MAX7219-based 64-pixel LED display via the XOBXOB cloud service.

You can also send serial data to the microcontroller, for example, from a smartphone or any device with a web browser, anywhere in the world, connecting your physical world to the web in a very accessible way.

These more advanced examples are still simple to use and fast to get started with – you can use the XOBXOB service and XOBXOB’s sample projects and resources to get an elaborate demonstration of cloud-based control of a LED display or other device up and running in minutes.

The functions of the XOBXOB Arduino libraries are well documented in XOBXOB’s Arduino library guide, making it easy to move past the basic examples provided and implement XOBXOB connectivity for your own specific application.

For example, your Arduino code can control whatever you want to happen in the handler that corresponds to the ON/OFF button being used on the XOBXOB dashboard. XOBXOB works by creating small “mailboxes” called XOBs. To control additional devices from your XOBXOB dashboard, you create a new device in the dashboard, and give it a name.

Your Arduino code then needs to request that XOB by name in the “requestXOB” function, meaning that it will respond to that device on the cloud side when needed – multiple different devices can be independent of each other, or they can talk to each other if you like.

Your physical things can send and receive messages through a XOB, and by sharing XOBs, things can send messages to each other. In this regard, XOBXOB is a true Internet-of-Things platform, allowing machine-to-machine communications with packets of data travelling between connected devices.

The machine-to-user control and communications provided by the Web interface is only a part of the overall system – it is not just providing Web-based datalogging of temperature or other data collected from the hardware devices, it also provides the capability for machine-to-machine communications and basic bidirectional control of the hardware from the Web service.

Although the platform is skewed towards the Arduino-compatible hardware platform, this is still perfectly acceptable for a wide range of products and allows for rapid development due to the open-source nature of the platform. This allows us to bring your IoT product ideas to market in a much shorter period of time.

To find out if XOBXOB is an ideal fit, or to explore other options to solve your problems – 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.

Over a long period of time it has become apparent that in some parts of the electronics market, there is something of a “race to the bottom”, with cheap manufacturers and online vendors racing to promote and sell the absolute cheapest possible device that is claimed to deliver a given sort of functionality.

For example, this is particularly apparent in the ecosystem of cheap “Arduino-compatible” microcontroller development boards and “Arduino clones” coming out of the online Asia-based market, as well as in cheap derivatives and clones of other popular Open Hardware and Open Software products – as with RepRap-style 3D printer controller electronics

We’re not convinced that much good always comes from this demand (in some portion of the market) for ultra-cheap hardware with every possible corner cut off it. It is valuable to pay attention to the differences that may exist between genuine devices from a particular vendor and third-party “clone” devices – even if you think that Open Hardware means that a second-source vendor can and will reproduce the original hardware design faithfully.

Whilst low-cost devices may be technically suitable in some applications, if you know what the technical specifications of a given hardware device really are as it is manufactured, it is important to at least understand that you might be getting something largely unknown versus something with known, expected specifications and an expected standard of quality – and a “cheap” device may not actually make good economic sense at all.

Does anybody potentially win this “race to the bottom”? And will any good ever come of it, especially if you’re not aware of it and you go in trying to source your hardware without the right expectations?

Just as an example, we might consider the “Iteaduino Lite”, recently launched on crowdfunding site Indiegogo as the “most inexpensive full-sized Arduino derivative board”, which is “nearly 100% Arduino compatible”. But is this really the same thing as an Arduino Uno, at a small fraction of the price?

Obviously there have to be some traps hiding somewhere. These kinds of issues may or may not be important in your particular application context, but you need to be aware of these kinds of issues when specifying and sourcing the components needed to accomplish the result that you want, reliably, at the best possible price.

The microcontroller used in the “Iteaduino Lite” is not an Atmel ATmega328 or any Atmel AVR microcontroller at all, but a LogicGreen LGT8F88A, an obscure low-cost Chinese-designed clone of the Atmel AVR that sort of resembles an ATmega88, with some differences.

The Atmel ATmega88 has only 8 kB of flash compared to 32 kB of flash in the ATmega328 commonly associated with “Arduino-compatible” devices, along with 1 kB of SRAM (compared to 2 kB on the ATmega328) and 512 bytes of internal EEPROM (compared to 1 kB on the ATmega328).

You need a custom-patched version of the Arduino IDE to add support for this hardware target; you can’t just use it with a stock installation of the Arduino IDE that you’ve downloaded and installed. Even if this microcontroller really is “close enough” to an Atmel ATmega88, which is not demonstrated, you have to recognise that the significant memory limitations of an ATmega88 compared to an ATmega328 that you might be used to in “Arduino-compatible” devices mean that it is likely that many existing Arduino programs that are tested and working on a real Arduino Uno or equivalent will not work on a device like this, even with support for that chip added to the Arduino IDE.

One of the root causes of this sort of problem is that terminology like “Arduino compatible” is not stringently defined, and there are no well controlled set of standards for what is Arduino-compatible and what is not so anybody can make up their own loose definition of Arduino-compatible so that their product satisfies this definition and gives them this marketing advantage.

If the firmware on the microcontroller is somehow corrupted or replaced, are the appropriate files, tool chain and documentation available to allow you to successfully re-flash it? It’s not clear that this is available. And if not, what happens then? Do you throw the hardware in the bin, and redesign the product?

Also note that a CP2102 has been used as the USB virtual UART chipset, as opposed to the ATmega8U2 or ATmega16U2 found on most modern Arduino or Arduino-compatible devices. How fast is this virtual UART? Probably significantly slower than the speeds you will expect from a real Arduino Uno or compatible device.

Furthermore, you’ll need the drivers for that chipset installed on your PC, and it is not established that good support exists for this device across all operating systems and it is easy to track down an appropriate driver for your PC. Successfully using a real Arduino on the same PC does not demonstrate that the correct driver for this device is installed – this is just adding another layer of potential confusion and difficulty, especially for beginners learning to work with microcontrollers and embedded systems for the first time.

In some of the photos it looks like they’re not even populating a crystal on the board. Are they using an internal RC oscillator? Then for best results the user should understand that that’s the case, and that you can’t have really accurate timing. Furthermore, the voltage regulators have been changed away from the original Arduino Uno reference design, presumably in order to cut cost – how well documented is that?

Are the specifications really trustworthy? They claim the maximum allowable input voltage for this board is 24V, but you can clearly see in the photos there are a couple of 25V rated tantalum caps in the power supply input part of the board, meaning that an input voltage of close to 24V is not realistically acceptable.

What is the realistic current output available from the 5V and 3.3V pins on the “Arduino” to power external loads? This is often highly variable in cheap Arduino clones where corners have been cut in the power supply and voltage regulator components.

Again, part of the reason for that is that there are no standards or interoperable industry specifications for the hardware that all the different manufacturers work to for “Arduino compatible” devices – compare this with the ATX computer power supply specification, which is well specified and is followed well by every hardware manufacturer in the industry, allowing high confidence in interoperability and compatibility between hardware from different vendors.

If a third-party company released Arduino-compatible products clearly labelled with their own brand, under their own name, with their own website where you could go to for support questions for that company’s products, and it was clear that this is not “from Arduino” but it’s released and supported and manufactured by a third-party company even though it is “Arduino-compatible” to some specified degree, then this would prevent the situation where somebody has problems with a cheap generic clone “Arduino” and then posts on the Arduino forums saying “I bought an Arduino and it is faulty!”. The official Arduino team in Italy, understandably, might get annoyed with this.

A lot of the cheap Chinese hardware makers and online vendors really fail to do this at all and this is what is potentially quite disruptive and annoying to the real owners of that hardware brand, for example the Arduino team in Italy. On the other hand, some other vendors of third-party Arduino-compatible hardware, such as Sparkfun or Freetronics for example, do identify their own products clearly and provide independent support for their products, which is a more responsible way to behave in this regard.

If you design a popular hardware product, such as Arduino for example, and openly release production-ready Gerber files to the public, does this encourage the unscrupulous manufacturing of “clone” hardware, by vendors who don’t change the manufacturer’s name or any of the details printed on the board at all?

If you release schematics or EDA files, but not finished Gerber PCB layout files, does this allow you to still have an open hardware design that can be examined and studied openly, without setting the hurdle quite so low for lazy or unscrupulous third-party manufacturers? This is an interesting issue to think about if you’re designing and releasing open source hardware.

Basically, lots of little subtle risks and complexities make a product like this harder to use, meaning that the appearance of value may not mean an increase in actual value for money at all. While these complexities and challenges may be understood and overcome by a user with more experience with electronics, they can be particularly challenging for less experienced users who might be just starting out learning to work with electronics and work with embedded systems – and this is particularly difficult where it affects a platform such as Arduino that is targeted at just this market.

In the case of a system like Arduino, which is specifically targeted at accessibility to beginners without a deep level of engineering knowledge, these cost-cutting measures are likely to have a particularly noticeable impact on the quality of the user experience – whereas for a device used mainly by more experienced, advanced users these issues would be more likely to be recognised and avoided, so the user would buy a product like this with realistic expectations about what they’re getting.

Although the example subject of our article is a popular consumer-level product, the points raised apply to all levels of hardware design and manufacturing. When developing your own products it can be tempting to keep searching for the absolute cheapest parts or components.

This may seem like a great idea at the time, however a few cents saved here or there will cost you and your end-user customers when the product fails due to low-quality components, premature end-of-life requiring a redesign, and loss of reputation for offering poorly-designed products.

To avoid all of these traps and more, you can have well-designed products that are made to last and also meet sensible budget requirements. Here at the LX Group our team of design engineers and work with your requirements and help you in any or all steps of product design to ensure your idea becomes a reliable, cost-effective and worthy product that will satisfy your customer requirements.

To get started, 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.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has recently announced the publication of the Bluetooth 4.1 Specification with some interesting improvements to the standard, which greatly increase the usability of this wireless technology in devices for the “Internet of Things”, which offers new applications that allow such devices to serve as both hub and peripheral devices.

This paves the way for Bluetooth 4.1-enabled devices such as sensors to connect directly to the Internet. It also allows devices such as fitness dataloggers and headsets to collate data from sensors such as temperature sensors and heart rate monitors over Bluetooth networks then report back to a smartphone or tablet with their collected data. In turn, those devices could be used as sensors that other devices can communicate with and pull data from.

This new profile is the first major update of the Bluetooth specification since version 4.0 was released in 2010, including the Low Energy specification, a subset of version 4.0. The version 4.1 updates are all software related, so it is possible for over-the-air firmware updates to upgrade existing Bluetooth 4.0 systems with new firmware, with no hardware changes or replacement, to make them Bluetooth 4.1 compatible.

Bluetooth 4.1 adds support for bulk data transfers at higher data rates, so that information collected from sensors over a period of time can be downloaded in bulk from multiple sensors. Bluetooth is still a low data-rate protocol compared to, say, Wi-Fi or Ethernet, but as Bluetooth is expected to handle ever-larger streams of data from embedded sensors this is a useful improvement – downloading data from sensors to a datalogging appliance might take, say, a few seconds instead of 10 or 20 for existing systems.

Bluetooth 4.1 allows Bluetooth devices to act as both a peripheral device and a hub at the same time, allowing a Bluetooth device that may have previously been networked with a smartphone or tablet to itself act as hub for other Bluetooth peripheral devices.

For example, your Bluetooth 4.1 enabled smart watch might be able to grab weight information logged from a Bluetooth-enabled scale and display it for you as well as being able to pass that data along to a smartphone. Bluetooth 4.1 also adds improvements to the sleep-wake cycle of the Bluetooth radio, allowing Bluetooth devices to automatically connect more easily (if allowed) without manual intervention.

Another example could be a bathroom scale that can automatically connect and download the distance walked from your Bluetooth-enabled pedometer or exercise tracker when you walk into the bathroom.

Bluetooth 4.1 improves coexistence between Bluetooth devices and 4G Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) cellular devices, to prevent potential interference. Although this is not a significant problem for Bluetooth 4.0 devices today this was considered to be a potential problem in future as more and more Bluetooth 4.0 devices are in use, talking to 4G connected smart-phones or tablets.

The new specification also increases the time-out period between devices, so that removing a Bluetooth device (such as your phone, for example) outside the proximity of another Bluetooth device it is connected to for a short moment and then back again may not mean that the Bluetooth connection has to be reconnected, improving user experience.

Furthermore it also lays the groundwork for IP-based connections between Bluetooth devices, in the same way a Wi-Fi router connects to multiple Wi-Fi devices, giving Bluetooth devices a way to talk directly to the Internet. Plus version 4.1 adds a standardised way to create a dedicated channel which could be used for IPv6 communications over Bluetooth in the future, enabling the possibility of native IPv6 networking from the Internet down to the LAN right down to wireless sensor nodes, in a similar way to how 6LoWPAN enables this type of connectivity for 802.15.4 wireless networks.

However, adding IPv6 connectivity to Bluetooth devices may substantially increase the power budget of battery-operated devices, especially Bluetooth Low Energy devices designed for extreme power efficiency, so this may not be an appropriate choice in all cases.

Such Internet connectivity directly to Bluetooth devices opens up interesting potential for the future development of Bluetooth, for example phone calls made over VoIP directly to a person’s Bluetooth headset, or the remote viewing of health data from medical sensor devices by healthcare professionals.

These improvements to the Bluetooth standard, such as IPv6 support, the ability to act as a hub instead of only as a peripheral, better radio sleep-wake cycles, timeout changes and improved data rates make Bluetooth 4.1 easier to use in the development of networks of wireless, power-efficient networked devices that aren’t intended to always be paired directly to a single Bluetooth enabled smartphone or tablet – in other words, Internet-of-Things networks and devices.

As you have just read, the new Bluetooth profile offers a great amount of promise in terms of functionality and convenience for the end user. Here at the LX Group our engineers have an excellent understanding of many wireless platforms – including Bluetooth – and are ready to integrate it with your new and existing products.

To get started, join 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.

The new ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 (SEP2.0) ZigBee Application Profile brings with it powerful new ZigBee capabilities for smart energy metering and control networks. With its ability to transport rate, demand, and load management messages to and from networks of smart energy appliances and the “Smart Grid” across a wide variety of wired and wireless media, the profile promises to be a key element of residential energy management systems.

Capable of passing energy-related messages across a HAN, or Home Area Network, using numerous different types of wired or wireless physical media, SEP2.0 is aimed at enabling the next generation of interactive smart appliances, HVAC, lighting and energy management systems – a “Smart Grid” of energy-efficient technology.

An IP-based HAN enabled by ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 makes it possible to manage every aspect of the energy consumption and production of a home or building, whilst moving the information around a network built entirely around the Internet Protocol and interconnected with existing networks and the Internet.

The ZigBee Smart Energy 1.0/1.1 Profile was originally developed to allow 802.15.4/ZigBee low-power wireless mesh networks to support communication between smart meters and products that monitor, control and automate the delivery and consumption of electricity – and potentially other household utilities such as gas and water, moving into the future.

The functionality of the Smart Energy 1.x Profile was primarily intended to support the functional requirements of smart meters being used by electricity, gas and water utilities to manage their distribution networks, automate their billing processes, and communicate with customers’ energy management systems.

ZigBee-enabled smart meters act as communications gateways between the utility and the consumer, enabling the exchange of messages about pricing, demand response and peak load management. At least this technical capacity exists in theory, but electricity retailers will only bother with it if they have a revenue model in implementing such technology.

The ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 Profile was created in response to the need for a single protocol to communicate with the growing universe of energy-aware devices and systems that are becoming common in homes and commercial buildings. For that reason, a diverse range of Function Sets were defined under SEP2.0, including Demand Response and Load Control, Metering, Billing, Pre-Payment, Directed Messaging, Public Messaging, Price Information, Distributed Energy Resource Management and Plug-in Electric Vehicle Management.

One or more of these Function Sets can be used to implement one of the Device Types defined in SEP2.0, such as Meters, Smart Appliances, Load Controllers, Smart Thermostats, In-Premises Displays, Inverters and Plug-in Electric Vehicles to name just a few.

ZigBee Smart Energy 1.x access the MAC/PHY layers of the 802.15.4 radio hardware via the ZigBee Pro protocol stack, but SEP2.0 replaces the ZigBee Pro protocol stack with the ZigBee IP stack, which uses the 6LoWPAN protocol to encapsulate the proprietary ZigBee packet structure within a compressed IPv6 packet. At the transport layer, IP packets bearing messages containing standard ZigBee command and data packets are exchanged using the familiar HTTP and TCP protocols.

When used in combination with the SEP2.0 Application Profile, the ZigBee IP stack provides a media-independent interface between the network and MAC layers of the stack that allows SEP2.0 packets to be carried across nearly any IP-based network.

A recent version of SEP2.0 includes support for communication across ZigBee and 802.11 wireless LANs as well as powerline communication (PLC) networks. SEP2.0 will also have improved future support for 802.15.4g, where the physical layer of the ZigBee/802.15.4 network is a sub-gigahertz radio at, say, 900 MHz for long-range outdoor telemetry or environments where the 2.4 GHz spectrum is congested. Support is also improving for other popular network technologies such as Ethernet.

Amongst the first SEP2.0 enabled products to hit the market will be Energy Service Portals (ESPs) which serve as a bridge between an energy utility’s communication infrastructure and the IP-based Home Area Network. These portals are provided to consumers by utility companies, and use the SEP2.0 Energy Services Interface profile to provide a bridge between the SEP1.x protocol used by most existing smart meters and the home’s IP-based network.

A ZigBee-enabled home energy management system can employ multiple Application Profiles to provide unified control of all home energy systems. For example, a smart home energy management system may use the Smart Energy (SE) profile to pass the utility’s load management and demand response messages to the home’s major loads and energy sources.

The Home Automation (HA) and RF for Consumer Electronics (RF4CE) profiles may then be used to communicate with Smart Appliances, lighting systems and other consumer-controlled products. Energy-aware homes will also employ a large number of end-point applications such as smart thermostats, in-home energy displays (IHDs), and tablet-based control panels that use SEP2.0-enabled ZigBee or Wi-Fi radio links to communicate with the home’s ESI and other elements of its energy management system.

SEP2.0-equipped network endpoints may also be implemented with the physical layer of the network using power line communications, networking smart appliances without RF spectrum congestion.

The ZigBee Alliance has created well-defined provisions for interoperability with, and upgrade paths from, the earlier SEP1.x standard to SEP2.0, which is good news for engineers looking to upgrade or to interoperate with existing SEP1.x technology. There is no significant increase in the processing power required in your hardware, although the key generation and exchange functions in the SEP2.0 security layer may be tough for 8-bit microcontrollers to handle unless they have security acceleration capability, handling the cryptographic maths in dedicated hardware.

Unfortunately, in terms of memory, SEP2.0 and the applications it supports require significant increases in both flash and RAM over what is required for most SEP1.x applications. Storing the code for a SEP1.x stack, a small application profile and a simple user application requires roughly 160 kb of flash in a typical microcontroller, plus 10-12 kb of RAM. Implementing comparable functionality under SEP2.0 requires about 256 kb of flash and 24-32 kb of RAM.

As an example of an existing hardware reference solution targeting SEP2.0, Texas Instruments provides an example consisting of the CC2533 802.15.4 RF system-on-chip, which runs the MAC/PHY layers of the SEP2.0 stack on its built-in 8051 core, combined with one of TI’s ARM7 Stellaris 9000-series microcontrollers as the application processor, running the remainder of the network stack and the application code.

Most of the microcontrollers in this powerful family include a fully-integrated Ethernet MAC, CAN interface, USB host controller, and enough memory and processing power to implement many simple SEP2.0 applications.

It is also worth considering some of the highly integrated single-chip solutions on the market such as the Texas Instruments CC2538, which integrates a 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 radio, ARM Cortex-M3 32-bit microcontroller core, hardware security acceleration for SEP2.0 and plenty of flash and RAM to support the ZigBee IP stack, SEP2.0 profile and application code with support for over-the-air firmware flashing capability for updates in the field, all in a single chip.

As you have just read, the new profile offers a great amount of promise in terms of functionality and convenience for the end user. Here at the LX Group our engineers have an excellent understanding of the Zigbee platform and have put this to use to create various systems for a wide range of customers – and we can do this for you too.

To get started, join 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.

Let’s take a brief overview of the web applications and cloud platform available from Exosite – a provider of Internet-of-things cloud services that help you collect, store, visualise and interact with data from your networked devices in the cloud. Exosite provides a cloud platform that can be connected to your Internet-connected sensors and other devices.

Once your device is connected, data is flowing into the cloud and you can set up logical rules to process and act on that data, log timestamped historical data or use Exosite’s built-in scripting language to process and interact with that data. Time-series information can be used to visualise, command or control devices, either in real time or in response to trends over time.

Their platform makes it easy for product developers to create cloud-capable connected products with a range of microcontrollers and RF solutions from different hardware vendors. Exosite’s “One Platform” and “Portal” families of cloud Platform-as-a-Service and web applications provide value to developers and device OEMs, helping to minimise risk and time to market for developers of Internet-of-Things connected products. Exosite can help you to quickly prototype and deploy systems to meet your needs for cloud-based remote access to devices and their data.

Exosite’s data platform is a hosted-served system that removes barriers to market entry and empowers companies to quickly prototype and deploy their own Internet-of-Things solutions using Exosite’s web service APIs. The system is designed with product developers in mind, meaning that it has a built-in framework that eliminates the complexity of infrastructure and simplifies IoT development. Exosite’s “One Platform” makes it easy for product developers to create cloud-capable products.

Furthermore the Exosite developer site provides a wealth of convenient user guides, API documentation, application notes and support information, as well as example source code and reference projects covering a range of different programming languages and architectures. There are libraries for interaction with the Exosite API in a range of different programming languages, allowing you to work with the languages that best suit your needs.

Working and maintaining the software is simplified as Exosite supports over-the-air firmware and software updates from their cloud service, if supported in the particular hardware used. This allows for remote wireless management of your devices, allowing firmware updates, feature enhancements, and other maintenance rolled out without the need for physical on-site service of hardware devices offers great value and convenience, improving user experience and reducing support costs for networks of Internet-of-Things connected devices.

With Exosite you can build pre-configured settings in the cloud for your families of devices, enabling newly manufactured devices to know exactly what version of software to install – right from the cloud, without any local intervention – as soon as they come online on the Internet.

As well as automatic provisioning, Exosite’s built-in device management tools make it easy to manage software installations and updates. When it comes time to update your devices in the field, you can simply upload your new content, select the device model type you would like to update, and hit deploy. Your new firmware is then deployed automatically, from the cloud, to every one of your connected devices of that type out there in the world. If those devices are not always connected to the Internet, they will automatically update themselves with the new software the next time they connect to the Internet.

Gathering data from an Exosite system isn’t difficult at all, and it allows you to aggregate and monitor data from your network of devices in the cloud in real time – as well as run powerful scripts to combine multiple lower-level inputs and build custom dashboards to report on defined metrics in an easily interpretable, visible way.

Exosite is easy to integrate with other systems, allowing you to easily push data out of its cloud platform into existing, external services. Since Exosite is based around cloud infrastructure, you can scale your application without having to worry about infrastructure or server administration.

You can build your own web app, or customise Exosite’s own app. You can get started with an Exosite developer account for free and use their simple but powerful set of APIs to start interacting with your devices in real time over the Internet. When you’re ready to scale up with your commercial solution, you can easily move up to a paid account, giving you an OEM-ready “white label” platform with the features and capabilities needed to build a business around your connected Internet-of-Things application.

For a better end-user experience designers can easily customise the website theme, control the user experience, configure device options and set up pricing plans for your customers, but you can grow at your own pace without worrying about the scalability of the underlying server infrastructure.

Exosite supports a range of open source and proprietary hardware development kits and platforms, reducing the time required to develop and build Internet-of-Things connected hardware solutions. For example, Exosite provides libraries for use with Ethernet-enabled Arduino and Arduino-compatible development boards, as well as support for development kits and development boards with network and Internet connectivity from hardware vendors such as Microchip and Texas Instruments.

Combining these hardware development tools with Exosite’s cloud platform allows you to get online with cloud-connected hardware quickly, getting your sensor data online and getting physical devices interacting with the cloud. Exosite makes it easy to connect, manage, and share your sensor or device data online.

Testing or getting started with Exosite is simple, as the free developer account has everything you need to start interacting with your devices in real time over the Internet. You get a web dashboard account, full access to the API, a cloud scripting environment, and the ability to upgrade features a-la-carte.

This account is aimed at allowing you to build your own Internet-of-Things environment on a one-off basis. If you find value in it and want to deploy it as a business solution for a wider audience then you can easily upgrade to a paid “white label” account in order to do so. Finally the developer account includes two devices and one user, while a paid account gives you support for many more devices, many more users, SMS messaging capability from the cloud and more.

It’s no secret that the Internet-of-things not only holds a lot of promise for connected devices and the possible products you can profit with – however getting started can seem like a maze with literally scores of options, platforms and hardware types.

To make your start in the IoT as smooth and cost-effective as possible, partner with the LX Group. We have experience in all stages of IoT product development – along with every other stage of design to manufacturing. To get started, join 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.

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.

Should your next product or design be an Internet-of-Things product? That is, should every embedded design always feature Internet connectivity, or machine-to-machine communications, where the possibility exists? There are lots of different perspectives on this question, several advantages and disadvantages and pros and cons that need to be weighed up.

Although Internet-of-Things connectivity is very popular and hyped at the moment, it isn’t always going to be a worthwhile fit that provides valuable advantages for all devices in all situations.

Internet connectivity provides advantages – data collection and logging with the data stored in the cloud, accessible via the Internet from any device anywhere in the world, or the possibility of convenient remote access and control of devices via the Internet, for example, but this type of Internet connectivity brings with it concerns over security, safety and privacy.

There is a very slight potential that devices connected to the Internet can be accessed by unauthorised persons, if and only if exploitable security vulnerabilities exist. This is a serious concern for Internet services that control real, physical hardware that is potentially dangerous if misused, or for hardware that controls security-critical systems such as building access-control systems for example.

Control of security-critical real-world hardware, and the secure and confidential management of personal information (data collected from health and medical data-logging instruments such as RF heart rate sensors, for example, or information from a home automation system that indicates the typical hours that people are at home and are not at home) needs to be taken into account when deciding to have embedded automation systems exposed to the Internet.

Product designers need to consider whether the benefits of Internet connectivity are worth the risks. Consumers expect that such data will be collected and handled with some degree of privacy and security, and the convenience of Internet-based data collation and access to data will only be accepted by the market if it doesn’t also come with unacceptable privacy concerns.

If your design incorporates Internet connectivity, does this connectivity contribute to a positive, easy user experience or does it potentially make the user experience more difficult? If your product or design requires the consumer to have an existing Wi-Fi or Ethernet network to provide Internet connectivity, for example, is this inconvenient for some consumers?

Even though most consumers already have Wi-Fi networks, is the product still worthwhile for consumers that don’t? What about if the Internet connection to the LAN, or a mobile or cellular Internet connection if that’s what you’re using, fails? Can your design still function usefully in an environment without Internet connectivity, or is it completely useless?

Can the device work in a transparent, convenient way for the end user in an environment where the Internet connectivity is unreliable and may be off-line sometimes? For example, can data be temporarily buffered in local memory while the device is off-line, and then transmitted to the Internet service later, reconnecting transparently without user intervention?

Adding Internet-of-Things connectivity to a design can introduce hardware complexity, and extra cost for your device. It can mean other increased costs such as server and hosting costs, the costs of wireless LAN or other network infrastructure, the cost of cellular network access if cellular modems are used, and potentially the significant costs associated with RF regulatory compliance, testing and approval for consumer products which are intentional RF radiators. Such regulatory requirements may be simplified or eliminated if the RF connectivity component of your design is eliminated.

Are these costs worth it for the benefits? Or are you simply over-engineering, and adding “Internet of Things” connectivity because it’s in vogue and it’s a trendy buzzword? Do these features provide value for money in the context of your particular product, or are they simply features for features’ sake?

Overcomplicated, over-engineered systems that try and pack too many features into a single design can potentially suffer from disadvantages such as increased hardware cost and size, decreased market uptake due to relatively high cost, relatively high power consumption, more difficult and complicated user interfaces, and greater challenges in trying to assure the reliability, security, low maintenance and support costs of your design.

Furthermore a larger, more complicated system inevitably has more points of potential hardware (or software) failure, more work to be done in debugging and quality assurance, and more potential points of security vulnerability.

All this may sound like the Internet-of-things is a negative point of difference for existing and potential products – however this couldn’t be further from the truth. You already know that connected devices are the way of the future. The key to success in manufacturing, information security and customer satisfaction lies in the right design and working with a team who understand the IoT and how it can be put to work for your benefit.

Here at the LX Group we have experience embedded hardware design for the IoT, including security, regulatory standards and compliance testing, working within standards and design for manufacture. To get started, join 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.

When your organisation understands that creating new IoT devices is necessary, but you’re not entirely sure about the future of the technology with regards to which platform to settle on – it can be difficult to make an informed decision. The “paradox of choice” can often stall progress, until now. With the Waspmote platform from Libelium, you can use an incredibly wide range of wireless technology and platforms to meet your IoT goals.

Libelium’s Waspmote platform is an open source wireless sensor network platform specifically focussed on the implementation of low-power modes, allowing individual battery-powered nodes (or “motes”) to be completely autonomous and to run for many months or years without maintenance.

Depending on the duty cycle, types of sensors and the radio used, it is possible for a Waspmote node to run for as long as five years on a single battery. The advanced Waspmote “mote” for wireless sensor networks is at the centre of Libelium’s complete ecosystem for Internet-connected wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications.

Waspmote allows for highly flexible implementation of wireless sensor networks – the connection of almost any type of sensor you can think of to any cloud platform, using many different common wireless networking technologies. Using the waspmote platform is a great way to implement Internet-connected sensor networks for Internet-of-Things and wireless sensor network applications, with a huge range of supported sensor types as well as a range of different options for network and Internet connectivity.

There are many different options for wireless connectivity in a Waspmote system, including 3G, GPRS, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, 802.11 WiFi and Bluetooth. A combination of multiple different radio interfaces can be chosen if desired. Both 2.4 GHz and 800 MHz ISM 802.15.4/6LoWPAN radio hardware is available for use with Waspmote. With the right choice of radio hardware, radio link distances of up to 12 kilometres are possible.

Waspmote’s hardware architecture has been specifically designed to enable extremely low power consumption. Power to any of the sensor interfaces can be turned on and off under software control, as well as power to the radio transceivers.

Three different sleep modes make Waspmote one of the most power efficient wireless sensor network platforms on the market, with a current consumption claimed as just 70 nanoamps in hibernate mode. There are more than 60 different sensors available to connect to Waspmote – soil moisture, GPS, temperature, humidity, vehicle detection, light, PIR and radiation sensors to name just a few.

The platform also supports over-the-air programming (OTAP), allowing firmware development and update across a network of wireless sensor nodes without the need for physical access to the hardware. It is possible to choose unicast, multicast or broadcast delivery of new firmware updates across the wireless network, controlling which nodes receive the update.

The huge range of different Waspmote sensors available enables a huge spectrum of different application possibilities in industrial monitoring and automation, smart cities, environmental sensing, agriculture and home automation. In a typical network of Waspmote sensors, a number of end nodes are equipped with 802.15.4/6LoWPAN hardware, appropriate sensors for the desired application, and power supplied from a battery or other sources such as solar power.

These nodes send their sensor data over the 802.15.4 mesh network back to the gateway node, which is equipped with an Ethernet interface as well as an 802.15.4 radio. The (IPv4) Ethernet gateway changes the 6LoWPAN IP header to IPv4 while keeping the UDP transport layer, and it sends the data to the IPv4/IPv6 tunnelling machine which changes the header to the proper IPv6 format and sends the information (now using IPv6) to servers on the Internet, and from there to services, and ultimately users, who use the collated sensor data.

The Meshlium gateway reads the sensor frames coming in from the nodes and stores them locally, sending them out to external cloud services on the Internet. The frames coming in from Waspmote nodes are received over the 802.15.4 mesh network and sent out to the Internet via the Ethernet, WiFi or 3G interfaces, if present.

Data is sent from the Internet-connected gateway out to a cloud server on the Internet via HTTPS and/or SSH for security, and the Waspmote ecosystem is compatible with any cloud platform you like.

Notably, there is no lock-in or closed compatibility with any one particular web service, unlike with some alternative products on the market targeted at Internet-connected embedded applications. You can choose your servers, and choose your cloud software platform.

As well as being based around open hardware, the Waspmote IDE is distributed under an open source license. The Waspmote platform provides professional-grade wireless sensor network infrastructure combined with a strong commitment by Libelium to the philosophy of open-source technology.

Waspmote supports encryption libraries, ensuring the authenticity, security and integrity of the information collected from the wireless sensor network. Different encryption algorithms such as AES-256 and RSA-1024 are implemented.

As well as offering cryptology and security, strong mesh-network scalability, support for 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, support for an open, flexible choice of web services and cloud server infrastructure, the Waspmote platform offers easy and fast deployment, over-the-air programming for easy firmware maintenance and an intuitive graphical programming interface.

The highly power-efficient Waspmote hardware platform also lends itself to flexible power solutions, such as battery power, remote power from solar PV, or potentially other types of energy-harvesting power supplies – as well as use in almost any contemporary application.

Waspmote offers an open, approachable and easy-to-implement platform, which we can integrate with your needs to form a solution in a short time frame and your required budget. Getting started is easy, join 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.

LX Group has been awarded top honours as one of Australia’s fastest growing businesses in the 2013 BRW Fast 100 list. LX as positioned 45 in this year’s esteemed awards due to their sustained average growth over the four years to 2013.

LX Group is a multi-award-winning Australian electronics design house traditionally specialising in wireless and low-power electronics designs. LX Group is at the forefront of IoT (Internet of Things) and M2M (Machine to Machine) technology – the convergence of hardware devices, the cloud and apps.

LX’s motto, “we take your concept and make it a reality”, reflects their passion for innovative electronic product development.

Simon Blyth, the Managing Director of LX is ecstatic with the company’s success and attributes the growth to the LX team’s passion for what they do and their focus not just on working in the company but on developing and growing the company. “No matter how busy you are, you have to spend time working on the company. Look at where the company is now, and where it can be. Think of business initiatives as small start-ups and give them the time and attention that all start-ups need to be successful”.

The BRW Fast 100 list ranks Australia’s fastest growing, public and private, small and medium business from all of Australia’s major vertical industries who present solid business practices required to deliver exceptional growth. The BRW Fast 100 list is considered to be the premier guide to Australia’s fastest growing small and medium businesses.

The LX Team is thrilled to make its first appearance on the BRW Fast 100 List.