All posts tagged: Internet of things

LX lives and breathes the Internet of Things, so when we were approached by CommBank to collaborate in a one-of-a-kind experiment which would see Australia’s largest bank dip their toes in the vast pool that is IoT, we were more than a little excited. The experiment would incorporate the Internet of Things and blockchain technology throughout the supply chain for one of Australia’s leading orchards and demonstrate just how powerful these rapidly developing fields can be for business. It was our chance to show the world just what LX could do in this emerging space, and how our bread and butter – the Internet of Things – along with blockchain technology can influence every stage of the supply chain for the better.

Of course, for technology boffins like our engineers, the IoT and blockchain need little explanation. But for the rest of the business world, the understanding of these potent technologies is limited, to say the least. Taking part in the CommBank experiment would help LX and the other collaborators explain the potential for these technologies in real-world terms.

The experiment

CommBank’s Innovation Lab was keen to investigate how the global supply chain could be improved using these advanced technologies for end-to-end solutions. The Innovation Lab’s assessment determined that enhanced visibility and accountability throughout the supply chain was key to improving business.

Bringing together a range of experts in trade, banking, and technology to collaborate on this investigation, it was dubbed the Trade-chain Experiment. The process would see a shipment of almonds from Olam Orchards Australia – fitted with sensors to measure both temperature and humidity as well as cellular network tracking – make its way from Victoria to Germany via rail and sea networks. The produce would change hands between 5 independent companies along the way, and the experiment hoped to allow these firms to work together, enhancing visibility, thanks to IoT and blockchain technologies.

According to CommBank, “The transported goods are given a unified, secure record of their whereabouts, which can be checked via a web app at any time. This results in smarter planning and potential cost savings throughout the supply chain.”

The supply chain could use a shake-up

“This shake-up of the supply chain is about fairness. It’s saying, when the product leaves my place, it’s in a certain condition. If something happens during delivery, the supply chain takes that cost. The customer doesn’t pay for mistakes made along the way, and it incentivises the supply chain to be more efficient and accountable.” Simon Blyth, Director, LX Group.

Trust is at the heart of any supply chain, and yet the process often lacks transparency. Both suppliers and the end consumer are at the mercy of the middle-men and their ability to deliver a product on time and in an acceptable condition.

Olam, one of the world’s largest almond producers, faces hurdles throughout their supply chain which have consequences in terms of time to market, product quality, and most importantly, costs and reputation. In real terms, a large shipment of almonds from Australia to Germany changes hands several times throughout its journey. The temperature and humidity within the containers carrying the produce is critical for the quality of the product once it reaches its final destination. The lack of transparency in the supply chain means that accountability for damage or reduced quality is often hard to determine. For producers like Olam, this can mean a reduced price for their product and can affect their relationships with buyers.

Whilst the global supply chain is committed to adopting new technologies and enhancing accountability, there’s no doubt that the industry is overdue for a shake-up. Revolutionary technologies like IoT and blockchain have the capacity to disrupt existing logistics practices, through enhanced transparency, increased efficiencies, and never-before-seen responsiveness.

LX Group and the Internet of Things

“The international trading system has come a long way, and today we have technologies that have the potential to allow all parties in a supply chain to trust each other with fewer intermediaries and costly documentation,” CommBank Trade-chain Experiment.

Anyone with an interest in technology has heard the term ‘Internet of Things’. At LX, it’s our entire focus – bringing cutting edge IoT products to market and solving business problems in ways that were not previously possible, or perhaps even known. However, even now, we’re only scratching the surface in terms of applications for IoT. CommBank’s Trade-chain Experiment is giving both the Australian and international markets a peek at what’s possible by incorporating IoT devices with blockchain technology.

The connected world made possible by IoT allows us to create measurable solutions for business, helping them to better manage their assets, assign accountability, efficiently manage contracts and make better decisions. Keeping the transport operators accountable for the condition of stock by using smart contracts is one key element to the advantage of IoT and blockchain technology. It allows suppliers to automatically apportion the costs of damaged or quality-affected stock to those responsible and ensure their margins are maintained. It also means that the end consumer isn’t lumped with paying a premium for a product of reduced quality, in the event of an issue with transporting the stock. Not only does this keep costs under control for suppliers and the end consumer, it incentivises transport operators to maintain the highest standards of service.

IoT and blockchain work together to bring efficiency to the supply chain – minus the hassle, costs, and delays associated with enforcing complex legal frameworks. LX Group Director, Simon Blyth explains:

“There might be four or five different businesses taking stewardship of stock throughout a delivery. There may be multiple trucking and shipping companies across multiple countries and legal jurisdictions, and there’s a lot of money at play. Not only is there the opportunity to apportion risk using smart contracts, there’s also simply a lot of inefficiency in filling out paperwork and room for human error.

“If you’re providing fresh produce to a large FMCG and you know the temperature wasn’t quite right, you can deduct from the courier company a percentage of their rate as a penalty. That incentivises the supply chain to take real responsibility and accountability and improve the quality of service. You don’t have to go through these clunky legal systems to solve disputes.”

As a firm with over a decade’s experience in designing and creating IoT devices, LX is at the cutting edge of the IoT revolution.

“We build world-class products to compete on a global stage in high volumes. Where that fits in with blockchain and IoT is that, over a decade ago, we knew everything is going to be wireless. The key to adoption was ultra-low power, long battery life, low unit cost, and smaller units. So, we got really good at that type of product, and that became IoT. We strive to understand this kind of technology from every single angle. We are investing in these things because we have a good idea of where technology is heading next. That’s why we were so excited to be a part of this project. We see the intersection of IoT + blockchain + AI to be one of the next big technology waves”. Says LX Group CEO, Adam Schindhelm.

For the tech nerds in the room: The details

“I don’t believe we have seen innovation like we have in the last few decades in the entirety of human existence. The rate of innovation & technology change has gone exponential. IoT, blockchain and AI are going to be a big part of where we go next.” – Adam Schindhelm, CEO, LX Group.

The majority of LX’s deployments fall under the categories sensing and tracking. CommBank approached LX to provide four sensors for the experiment, which would measure the temperature and humidity inside the shipping containers transporting Olam’s almonds. Furthermore, we provided tracking devices which operated using cellular trilateration to monitor the shipment’s whereabouts.

The devices LX supplied were built around a low power ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, running predominantly in ‘deep sleep mode’ so as to maintain a battery life in excess of 60 days. This ensured that the complete journey of the goods could be tracked from the container loading at Mildura, to the transport by rail to the port, then loading on to ships to travel across two oceans, and finally unloading at the destination in Germany.

Hourly environmental sensing inside the container was achieved with a Bosch low power temperature and humidity sensor, and a cellular modem provided both network connectivity and location sensing via cell tower trilateration.

Each hourly sample of environmental conditions and location data was pushed from the device to the LX IoT Cloud, along with diagnostic information including battery level, RSSI, unique identifiers and timestamps. LX IoT Cloud is a powerful IoT platform built upon Microsoft Azure that aggregates sensor and tracking data and provides a rich API to integrate with the Ethereum based blockchain solution for the experiment.

At each stage through the data chain, packets are secured and encrypted, right from the initial sample on board the device, through cellular communications, LX IoT Cloud integration, and then pushing on to the block chain transactions and dashboard displays.

The experiment was a tremendous success for all involved. Together with CommBank and its other collaborators, LX has helped demonstrate the value of IoT and blockchain to business – and in more ways than one. The possibilities now are almost endless.

A final word from Simon on the Trade-chain Experiment:

“This experiment in particular excited me because people had started saying that blockchain would one day be bigger than the internet. Now, that’s a pretty big claim to make. I don’t know how you’d ever measure that. But, when you start to realise the extent to which blockchain can be used to enhance business, it’s actually not such a crazy idea. The more I thought about it the more applications I could see it being used for. From everything to small changes in how we currently do things today through to an entire machine to machine economy.

“For LX, the Internet of Things is part of a bigger picture of change. Akin to when the first transistor was built, we had no idea just how far that would go. And now look at the world we’re living in, with supercomputers in our pockets. LX sees IoT and blockchain really having the potential to change businesses everywhere, for the better.”

ARM’s mbed Cloud Internet of Things Device Platform is a cloud computing software-as-a-service solution for the Internet of Things, which aims to offer a scalable and customisable solution for IoT device management challenges, providing all the tools you need for large-scale cloud-based IoT solutions at your fingertips.

It aims to help you focus your efforts on building your IoT-enabled business instead of building networks, and to accelerate the time to market for IoT products and services.

The mbed Cloud platform aims to bring IoT connectivity, security and firmware update needs together under one roof, simplifying the connectivity, provisioning, security and updates for any IoT installation, big or small, across complex networks.

It’s a complete chip-to-cloud service built for IoT applications, a full-stack solution that extends the reach of the cloud all the way down to each end-node IoT device. Using the mbed platform means you don’t need to be an expert in every aspect of IoT security, networking stacks and wireless technologies before you can see benefits from cloud-connected IoT solutions.

Developers can take advantage of the extensive ecosystems and user communities around the ARM and mbed product families, helping save you months of development work.

Furthermore, the mbed Cloud platform is tightly integrated for use with the mbed OS platform that has been developed for IoT devices running on ARM’s Cortex-M microcontroller family.

Although the use of these components is not mandatory for use of the mbed Cloud platform, choosing the mbed OS running on a Cortex-M microcontroller does potentially offer a lot of synergy in terms of an energy-efficient, bandwidth-efficient, compact, powerful and fast-to-market full-stack IoT solution from your device to the cloud.

The mbed Cloud platform offers reliable communication and data delivery based around open industry standards, and support for a wide array of embedded platforms. In particular – the mbed Cloud offers strong energy efficiency and support for low-power devices, as well as support for bandwidth-constrained devices employing efficient communication protocols such as CoAP.

Furthermore, the mbed Cloud Portal and Cloud Connect service provide powerful, secure and power-efficient device management services, built to support a diverse range of devices.

You can easily connect your devices and recognise them in any network, and then securely connect, provision and manage your devices with cloud computing services from a range of providers.

The mbed Cloud and mbed Cloud Client can integrate easily with other cloud computing services, providing analytics and Big Data intelligence capabilities with the data collected from IoT devices. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Watson and IBM Bluemix are all supported for connectivity with mbed Cloud, for example.

The service is built to support large-scale deployments of IoT device nodes, even when these devices are resource-constrained, using unique caching mechanisms that enable brief bursts of data transmission, helping to minimise power use in wireless devices. The service is uniquely optimised for efficiency, regardless of device type, and offers easy expansion as new technologies energy.

It’s a highly scalable and future-proof IoT cloud solution that allows an organisation to track, maintain and update an ever-growing number of devices. A modular approach allows enterprises to configure the mbed Cloud platform and tailor the service as your IoT networks and needs grow and evolve.

And device management is no longer an afterthought – the mbed Cloud platform offers efficient and secure remote management for your IoT devices, including firmware management and fail-safe updates across all devices in a network.

Cloud Update allows you to roll out easy, secure, reliable and scalable software updates, with end-to-end orchestration to enable you to manage and monitor the update process across large networks. Plus, the Cloud Update provides security for firmware updates, allows authenticity to be verified, and maintains integrity and confidentiality of your firmware.

All this provides fail-safe protection against inappropriate accidental updates, and recovery features that allow devices to recover from failed or corrupted firmware updates.

The platform is designed to allow easy integration, independent of the vendor of your IoT devices. The use of simple REST APIs helps simplify integration, and accelerates proof-of-concept prototype projects.

This helps you achieve faster scaling of your IoT deployments, increased productivity and reduced time-to-market by enabling developers to work with any device. A range of open, industry-standard protocols for data connectivity are supported by the mbed Cloud platform, including CoAP, HTTP and OMA LWM2M (Open Mobile Alliance Lightweight M2M).

Internet of Things devices communicate via REST APIs, via the cloud platform, to your enterprise software and web apps. Solid end-to-end security is provided, including TLS and DTLS security support for the transport layer.

Cloud Provisioning is one key component of the mbed Cloud platform, providing trusted device authentication, on-boarding of new devices into the network, and service provisioning. You can set up devices with security credentials, and assign and control the rights that different apps must access IoT devices in the network.

The Cloud Provision feature lets you manage which different trusted parties or applications can access data from sensors and devices, bolstering security across the full IoT stack from the chip to the cloud.

Overall the mbed cloud platform is one of a seemingly infinite number of options for your existing or new Internet of Things platform. Making the right choice for your needs can be daunting, so consider turning to the experts in the field – the LX Group.

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.

The recently-finalised ESP32 is Espressif’s successor to the popular ESP8266 wireless connectivity system-on-chip – taking the low-cost connected platform even further with a new combination Wi-Fi and Bluetooth SoC.

The ESP32 offers powerful processing capability, flexible wireless connectivity, and strong support for sensor and peripheral interfaces, while maintaining low power consumption and efficient sleep modes that make it well suited for battery-powered applications.

These features, along with its low cost, make the ESP32 particularly attractive for mobile devices, wearable electronics and Internet-of-Things technologies.

Interfacing the ESP32 with other microcontrollers in an existing design is possible, adding on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth wireless connectivity in a peripheral way, through its UART, I2C, SPI or SDIO interfaces – but if you want to start from scratch with a new design the power of the ESP32 really comes into its own as a standalone wireless connectivity and processing platform. It provides almost everything you need for a complete Internet-of-Things application in one low-cost, compact chip.

The ESP32 uses a similar Xtensa LX6 32-bit CPU to the ESP8266, but has moved up to two processor cores, each of which can run at up to 240 MHz. The platform includes 128kB of ROM and 520kB of SRAM, and support for external Flash memory up to 64Mb in size, for program and data storage.

The device has 36 GPIO pins, and the use of a crossbar matrix means that any GPIOs, serial interfaces, timers and ADCs can be assigned to whichever pins you need. 16 channels of 12-bit ADC inputs are included, along with a programmable internal voltage reference – a huge step up from the limited resolution of the single ADC input pin on the ESP8266.

Up to 16 PWM output pins are provided, along with two 8-bit true DAC outputs, and two I2S interfaces which can be used for digital audio output into an external DAC, for example in an embedded internet radio application.

Multiple SPI and I2C ports are also provided, along with analog preamplifiers, a Hall-effect sensor, a temperature sensor, capacitive touch keypad inputs, and a JTAG interface that can be used for debugging with OpenOCD.

As well as 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz WiFi, the ESP32 radio architecture also includes Bluetooth 4.2 support, both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy, making it an extremely versatile, flexible platform for many wireless connectivity and Internet-of-Things applications.

The RF stage includes its RF switches, baluns, power amplifier, LNA and filters all integrated on the IC, meaning that almost no external components are required for wireless connectivity. This keeps physical size of the layout down, reduces BOM cost, makes it easier to use pre-certified radio modules incorporating the ESP32 chip and antenna connector, and reduces the amount of specialist RF expertise you need to successfully incorporate the ESP32 into your design.

Hardware accelerators for AES and SSL/TLS are also provided, allowing strong security to be easily implemented in Internet-of-Things applications without burdening the processors with the cryptography required.

These SDKs and software tools continue to be under active development, with more bug fixes and enhancements every day, and even though things are very immature at this stage, this development is occurring openly, where feedback from users and other developers is encouraged.

Just as we’ve seen with the ESP8266, we are likely to see the development of many community-driven open source software tools to support the ESP32, such as an ESP32-ready port of the NodeMCU Lua interpreter and support in the Arduino IDE for programming the ESP32, using the popular and easy-to-learn Arduino language. (This open-source ESP32 extension for the Arduino development environment is already under active development.)

Many of the system, GPIO and wireless networking function calls in the ESP32 SDK are fully compatible with the ESP8266 API, so it’s likely that many of these software tools will be ported across in the near future without too much difficulty.

Following the success of the ESP8266, Espressif has greatly enhanced its community engagement around the ESP32, putting much more effort into open support, comprehensive documentation, English-language datasheets and manuals – and engagement with the smaller-scale independent and “maker” communities of users. This also helps developers in the professional sphere as well.

Espressif provides the new ESP32 Software Development Kit, which they call the ESP32 “IoT Development Framework” (IDF) to distinguish it from previous SDKs, along with a suite of examples and documentation to allow users to easily get started with ESP32 software development. These resources include libraries, source files, example code, development toolchains, and everything else you need to get up and running.

With the possibility of such as low-cost and powerful microcontroller, you can imagine how excited the market is to receive the ESP32. And here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a success. 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.

The relatively new I3C specification, an extension of the popular Inter-Integrated-Circuit (I2C) serial bus for embedded systems, is actively under development and has recently reached the draft stage – with details available to the members of the MIPI Alliance for development and review.

I3C is being developed by the MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) Alliance, and it is specifically aimed at addressing future-proof interconnect needs in embedded mobile, Internet-of-Things and wearable computing devices that incorporate ever-greater numbers of advanced sensors and peripheral devices.

The MIPI I3C specification combines features from I2C and SPI into a new unified standard and scalable interface to connect many devices in embedded systems together – with minimal pin use, new capabilities, and improvements in power management and data rate.

The MIPI Sensor Working Group, consisting of many major system design and ASIC vendors, has been jointly defining the I3C specification, with the goal to re-use existing interfaces as much as possible while reducing pin count, providing in-band interrupts, reducing power use and engineering cost, as well as increasing bandwidth.

I3C builds new features onto the mature I2C standard such as a new high-data-rate mode which can support lots of data from sensors or other peripheral device – along with better support for relatively large networks of many devices connected to a host microcontroller.

Furthermore, I3C can compete with higher-bandwidth embedded serial interfaces like SPI, but still use only two wires like I2C does. The I3C standard is backwards compatible with I2C, so legacy devices with I2C interfaces can connect to the I3C bus, however new hardware (both on the peripheral and on the host controller side) is needed to take full advantage of the bandwidth and other benefits that I3C provides.

I3C offers higher speeds, greater power efficiency, reduced pin count compared to multi-device SPI networks, and support for relatively large sensor suites connected to a host microcontroller using only two wires but carrying ever-greater amounts of rich sensor data in wireless sensor network and IoT applications.

I3C was developed by MIPI’s Sensor Working Group as a potential way to unify the serial bus landscape with a single, consistent interface that can handle any kind of device, allowing all kinds of sensors to be very easily integrated into embedded systems.

It aims to combine the simplicity and the low wire count of I2C with the high speed and power efficiency of SPI, to merge both these popular

standards together, and to add powerful new features such as in-band interrupt support with no need for extra interrupt wires, advanced power management and dynamic addressing of the different ICs on the bus. And I3C does all of this while largely maintaining backwards compatibility with existing I2C devices.

A typical smartphone today may contain up to a dozen sensors, and the widespread adoption and cost reduction of technologies like MEMS means that these sensors are producing much more complex, rich data.

Moving all this data back to the central controller is stretching the capabilities of today’s familiar interfaces such as SPI or I2C, and this is the problem that I3C is primarily designed to address. I3C aims to incorporate and unify key attributes of I2C and SPI while improving the capabilities and performance of each approach with a comprehensive, scalable interface and architecture.

A typical system in use today may use a combination of I2C and SPI devices, with three wires for SPI, two wires for I2C, one further wire for each SPI device select line, plus an interrupt line for each peripheral device.

This complexity adds up quickly with modern sensor suites, and I3C aims to replace a dozen or more wires with just two wires, providing in-band interrupt capability without any need for dedicated interrupt lines wired back to the host device, reducing fragmentation between these different standards in the device market, freeing up pins on the host device, simplifying PCB engineering and making devices smaller, as well as offering speeds of up to 27 megabits per second.

I3C also includes multi-master support – this means it provides the ability for devices on the bus to request to take the master role, so the bus architecture is not limited to one single fixed master device and a number of slave devices.

Devices can be both master and slave, and direct “peer-to-peer” communication between I3C devices on the bus is possible without the master device needing to be involved in this exchange. I3C also introduces dynamic addressing, hot-joining and a uniform approach for advanced power management features such as sleep modes.

Devices on the bus can be powered on and off, and they don’t have to be activated when the I3C bus is powered up. They can be added onto the bus later, or connected initially but not powered on, without any issues with loading down the bus.

This hot-joining capability, like with USB devices, allows the master device to assign a dynamic address to the slave device when it comes up on the bus, and has advantages for power efficiency when sensor and peripheral devices are turned off and on to save power, as well as allowing for removable, hot-swappable modules.

Dynamic address configuration means that the master device on the bus assigns each device a unique address, either when the bus is initialised or when a new device is connected to an already-configured I3C bus. Like the now-ubiquitous dynamic host configuration in IP networks, this automatic address configuration potentially makes it much easier to set up I3C hardware, removing conflicts between hardware devices with fixed addresses.

We look forward to the evolution that is the I3C data bus, and how it can be part of efficient Internet of Things devices. And if you are too, here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a success.

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.

Over the last few months, the increasing number of Internet of Things platforms is a sure sign that the IoT is here to stay, and the latest to enter the market is the ExtremeConnect IoT platform.

This is a robust, secure and cost-effective solution for worldwide machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things data connectivity. The ExtremeConnect suite enables you to centrally manage and provision your entire network of global M2M/IoT deployments and customers from one convenient point, using ExtremeConnect cloud-based control centre.

This platform provides you with everything you need to easily and quickly deploy, manage, and monetise IoT & M2M services with seamless international mobile connectivity.

With ExtremeConnect, managing and monitoring your wireless connectivity has never been easier. It provides complete visibility, control, and management of all your devices – making it easy to provision, manage and monitor your networks of connected M2M or IoT devices.

Real-time visibility of device activity and usage, the ability to monitor and control inventory, and a plethora of other actionable features make ExtremeConnect an indispensable tool for IoT connectivity businesses wanting total control of their devices.

ExtremeConnect is designed to be particularly synergistic with cellular mobile connectivity, and ready for global deployments around the world. Service agreements between ExtremeConnect and Tier 1 mobile network operators around the world complete the ExtremeConnect IoT network and platform – ensuring that your M2M and IoT applications are always online, always connected, with seamless integration and functionality under one roof – with one provided to deal with.

Users can easily manage your data plans online, track, manage and activate SIMs, provision new devices, and keep close control across the entire SIM and device life cycle.

Instead of setting up relationships and accounts with multiple mobile operators across the world, ExtremeConnect provides you with a one-stop shop for management of your global, seamless IoT connectivity.

With ExtremeConnect, managing and monitoring your mobile IoT devices is easy, and the system is highly scalable so a huge number of devices can be supported. You can centrally manage and control your entire fleet of M2M/IoT devices or customer deployments from a single, secure web-based portal on any PC, mobile device or tablet.

This dashboard provides a comprehensive, graphical overview of all the IoT assets that you’re managing – potentially worldwide. Despite being highly data-rich, this dashboard is highly intuitive and easy to use, and enables you to quickly access the most important information that you need.

From SIM management and device management to alerts, reporting, support and billing, the ExtremeConnect platform offers the ability to intelligently control the elements that affect your bottom line, adding business value to your mobile IoT deployments and services, improving customer experiences as well as making your job easier.

Furthermore, the system ensures a seamless transition from local to regional to global connectivity – all from a single platform, all without the user having to change accounts, reconfigure devices or anything else.

End user customers can manage all their IoT devices dispersed around the world, with multiple different mobile carriers, from a single platform. As well as providing management and provisioning from a central cloud-based platform, the platform also offers the ability to connect customer devices with the right mobile carriers that provide the best available network coverage and pricing in a given region.

An entire fleet of M2M devices can be monitored and managed from a single point, connectivity failures can easily be diagnosed – and you can seamlessly manage bulk operations, such as the rapid loading of devices and one-click activation, or open and track issue tickets for customer enquiries, complaints or requests, all from the single control dashboard within ExtremeConnect. Historical information such as connectivity and status for each hardware device is also logged and searchable.

Key functionalities of ExtremeConnect include directly setting up your data plans online at one place, and tracking, activating and setting up the SIMs you need. ExtremeConnect gives you control over the entire SIM and device lifecycle – and you can define different attributes of your different devices, assign different technologies or billing plans as appropriate, and effortlessly support and manage multi-level accounts.

You can quickly and easily change the bandwidth allocation or billing structure assigned to a particular device, and provide customers with convenient data through alarms and notifications covering a range of parameters including bandwidth usage notifications, device connectivity failure, roaming charges, or suspicious fraud activity.

Whether your IoT and M2M devices need 3G, 4G or LTE connectivity, comprehensive connectivity solutions and worldwide relationships with established mobile operators are available, which ensures that your mission-critical Internet-of-Things applications are supported with seamless access to network infrastructure, an intuitive and scalable single-point management platform and reliable worldwide connectivity, today and into the future as cellular standards evolve.

Once again we have summarised an interesting and possibly useful new Internet of Things platform which could be the solution to your connected product or service needs. However, we can take the time to thoroughly work with you to ensure the right platform will be used.

Here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a success. 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.

The WaRP7 development board is the latest evolution of the “WearAble Reference Platform” (WaRP) development system from NXP Semiconductors – a next-generation, powerful but tiny development platform specifically aimed at the needs of advanced Internet-of-Things products and wearable computing applications.

It provides a complete, powerful ARM Cortex-A7 based embedded computer solution in a tiny form factor, with wireless connectivity, battery power, many different sensors, open-source operating systems and enough flexibility to offer all the advantages of other development tools, and it’s aimed at a range of different IoT applications and markets such as smart home and automation devices, personal devices for fitness and health monitoring and other wearable computing needs.

The WaRP7 platform includes extensive on-board connectivity and peripheral features including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, battery charging and power management on board, 8GB of onboard eMMC memory, and support for a huge range of sensors and add-on peripherals.

This system uses the MikroBus expansion socket system introduced by MikroElektronika for their microcontroller prototyping tools, allowing over 200 existing “Click” expansion modules and daughterboards to be added to the WaRP7 for easy development, hacking and rapid prototyping with a huge suite of different sensors and components.

It provides a rapid prototyping platform with pre-validated USB, NFC, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Smart and Wi-Fi connectivity, along with open-source reference OS builds and example software, providing a strong foundation that reduces the time-to-market for your IoT product development and allows product developers to focus their resources on creating their applications and the valuable, differentiating features of their product.

The motherboard is based on NXP’s i.MX 7Solo application processor, the latest in NXP’s (formerly Freescale) widely used, well-proven, Linux-ready i.MX family of processors. This i.MX7Solo system-on-chip features an ARM Cortex-A7 core as well as a Cortex-M4 core on the same chip – with the ability to easily handle both real-time microcontroller and GPIO functions along with higher-level operating systems that provide rich user experiences.

This heterogeneous multi-core architecture provides power management advantages too, allowing the system to drive a higher level operating system but also put the main processor to sleep sometimes, where it can be woken up in low-power modes by the Cortex-M4 processor.

Furthermore, the platform enables the strong energy efficiency that is critical for today’s portable and wearable IoT designs, but also strong computing power and convenient “wake-up” capability from a low-power state when it’s needed.

The platform offers a variety of connectivity and RF communications options, including NFC, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth 4.1 regular or Bluetooth Low Energy. Storage is covered with 8 GB eMMC for nonvolatile storage and 512 MB LPDDR3 RAM are also provided – along with built-in battery charging and power management, a MPL3115A2 barometric pressure sensor, FXAS21002C 3-axis MEMS gyroscope, and the FXOS8700CQ 3-axis accelerometer plus magnetometer.

A MIPI-DSI display port, built-in MIPI camera on the module and an audio interface are also provided, offering rich multimedia capability, and all these powerful sensors and peripherals are integrated into a tiny main board that measures only 2cm x 4cm.

This platform has been built from the ground up to address key challenges in IoT and wearable-devices engineering, including size, radio connectivity and battery life, and it is provided with a complete open-source hardware and software platform.

This includes hardware design files, operating system source code, bill of materials and all other open documentation – all of which allows developers to use this as a foundation for their product innovation without having to licence expensive proprietary IP.

Fully-featured Android and Linux operating system builds are provided, easing development effort for software developers, while also supporting extensive UI capabilities, powerful application software and connectivity stacks. All the source code is provided of course, so you do have the option of modifying the build of the open-source operating system yourself, if you need to customise it.

The WaRP7 development platform could be a powerful new player in the busy development board space, especially in wireless connectivity and wearable IoT applications where more computing power and an operating system such as Linux is required.

Its combination of tiny size, strong performance, focus on power efficiency and integration with a powerful suite of onboard peripherals – along with Linux or Android support, make it uniquely placed to offer value in a lot of different IoT and wearable application areas.

With the array of features, the WaRP7 could be the platform for your next Internet of Things product – and we’re ready to help turn your WaRP7 ideas into reality.

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 newest upcoming iteration of the Bluetooth specification – Bluetooth 5 – has recently been announced by the Bluetooth Special Industry Group – the industry consortium responsible for developing, standardising and promoting Bluetooth wireless technology.

Bluetooth 5 is expected to be released around the end of this year or the beginning of 2017 – and will offer significant increases in performance with up to four times the range, double the data rate and an eight-fold increase in broadcast messaging capacity.

This new evolution of the Bluetooth standard is all about doing more with less, offering rich new experiences which are compatible with customer expectations in today’s Internet-of-Things market – including greater bandwidth, a longer range while also retaining the very low power consumption of Bluetooth 4.0.

The Bluetooth standard has not had a major version bump since the release of Bluetooth 4.0 in 2009, and the Internet-of-Things market has clearly come a long way in the last seven years. One of the main goals of Bluetooth 5 is to remain at the forefront of the fast-moving Internet-of-Things space, both in terms of interoperability and back-end RF network technology as well as the front-end use cases and experiences that consumers expect from modern IoT products and technologies.

The “Bluetooth 4.0” version nomenclature has also been dropped, with a focus on a more streamlined version branding that is easier for the average customer to understand as a major technology revision when they’re shopping for new phones or devices.

While the exact range may vary depending on the hardware design and the power budget that is available, it may be possible to expect a range of up to 400 meters from a Bluetooth 5 connection.

Bluetooth 5 is designed with Internet-of-Things applications in mind, and the extended range that it offers will enable ubiquitous, reliable IoT connections across full-home and building and outside-the-building use cases where older Bluetooth devices are not practical, greatly opening up the potential applications for Bluetooth connectivity.

According to the executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, “Increasing operation range will enable connections to IoT devices that extend far beyond the walls of a typical home, while increasing speed, supporting faster data transfers and software updates for devices”, and “Bluetooth 5 will transform the way people experience the IoT by making it something that happens simply and seamlessly around them.”

With these technical improvements, the Bluetooth SIG aims to make Bluetooth-based IoT experiences seamless and ubiquitous, without users needing to think about range or device pairing.

As well as making the pairing process much easier for Bluetooth devices such as wireless speakers or keyboards, the significantly increased broadcast capacity in Bluetooth 5 is aimed at making beacons, location markers and other connectionless” Bluetooth services much more powerful and valuable, with the ability to transmit more, richer information as part of an effortless and seamless IoT experience.

According to the Bluetooth SIG, this will “redefine the way Bluetooth devices transmit information”, moving away from the app-paired-to-device model to a seamless and more IoT-compatible connectionless model where there is less need to download an app, pair devices together and connect the app to a device.

The increased bandwidth that Bluetooth 5 provides means that devices can be more responsive and can transfer their data faster, and increased broadcast capacity makes “connectionless” Bluetooth services like beacons, location-aware information and targeted advertising much more capable and powerful.

These improvements allow Bluetooth 5 to open up more potential Bluetooth applications and help Bluetooth to be an integral part of an accessible, interoperable IoT ecosystem.

Connectionless Bluetooth beacon technology has value in applications such as museums, galleries and other cultural and tourism institutions, providing location-aware information for navigation, allowing people to find local businesses or services near them – or for location-aware marketing or promotions.

However, excessive use of Bluetooth notifications for advertising, without requiring authentication or device pairing, may raise challenges in terms of customer acceptance and ethics and potentially creates a whole new avenue for ubiquitous spam.

Other applications such as industrial logistics and tracking inventory in warehouses are potentially valuable too – there is enormous scope for creative new applications of Bluetooth with these new capabilities.

Furthermore, these significant range and performance benefits are achieved without any significant increase in power consumption compared to existing iterations of the Bluetooth Low Energy standard with its already industry-leading power efficiency.

This means that Bluetooth 5 remains attractive, as with present Bluetooth implementations, in applications where power efficiency and long battery life is important, and the powerful new capabilities of Bluetooth 5 remain compatible with tiny, battery-operated beacons that are practical to deploy for a long time without maintenance or replacement.

By now you must realise that Bluetooth is still relevant and a feature that may be of benefit to your existing or new products. If this is of interest – there is a method of product development that is rapid and successful. Here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a success.

`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.

Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek has recently announced several new chipsets that deliver powerful capabilities for innovative Internet-of-Things, multimedia and wearable computing hardware products of all kinds. The first of these new products is the MT2523 chip, aimed specifically at the needs of today’s wearable computing applications.

This compact, low-power system-on-chip combines an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller core, a Bluetooth Low Energy radio for wireless networking with other devices, and a GPS receiver – a powerful combination of energy-efficient 32-bit microcontroller, GPS and wireless connectivity that is ideal for wearable computing and data logging applications such as personal fitness trackers.

The MT2523 offers efficient power consumption, delivering week-long battery life in a typical wearable consumer design, as well as a 41 percent reduction in chip size, which makes this chip attractive for wearable and portable devices where space is at a premium.

Another interesting new chipset from MediaTek which is aimed at the Internet-of-Things market is the MT7697 IoT Bridge. As the name suggests, this chipset is designed to help bring together the plethora of different network technologies and protocols used by the growing number of IoT and home automation products in the market.

The MT7697 chipset supports the latest Bluetooth Low Energy standards as well as dual-band Wi-Fi, enabling this device to act as a central gateway that can converge data from different kinds of connected devices. This is essential as consumer uptake of Internet-of-Things and home automation products with different connectivity technologies increases, making it a very attractive part of a “future-proof” home IoT network.

MediaTek have also recently announced their new M8581 chipset for optical media players, with one device able to decode all the familiar optical formats from CD to DVD to Blu-Ray, enabling high-definition viewing experiences at up to 4K ultra-high-definition with support for High Dynamic Range. It includes support for many of the latest audio and video codecs, including H.264 video and Dolby Digital Plus audio.

This ability to support many different media formats and codecs, including the most modern formats as well as legacy ones, consolidates the bill of materials in media appliances and keeps the cost of hardware low while offering consumers strong product capabilities and user experiences.

The MT2502 Aster system-on-chip is claimed to be the world’s smallest system-on-chip commercially available, and along with MediaTek’s own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE and GPS silicon products, it’s ideally suited for wearable computing, Internet-of-Things and mobile applications where space is at a premium.

The Aster SoC was launched last year, and made its debut as the core of the Omate X smartwatch. This smartwatch is expected to last up to a week on a single battery charge, showcasing the strong energy efficiency of this platform.

MediaTek has also recently launched its MediaTek Labs initiative, where the company that has been best known for its smartphone and tablet processors aims to diversify its research and development for the next generation of mobile gadgets, staying at the forefront of the latest trends in Internet-of-Things and wearable computing.

Their goal is to provide developers and engineers with tools such as MediaTek development kits to help build new devices and write new software, and to make these tools and resources as accessible as possible.

An interesting feature is that MediaTek Labs won’t be a private club only for major industry players – it’s designed to be used and enjoyed by both professionals and amateurs, everyone from students to CEOs.

According to the vice president of MediaTek Labs, MediaTek has big plans for the Lab, and they hope that the projects and technologies explored in it will “drive the next wave of consumer gadgets” and “apps that will connect billions”. MediaTek Labs is particularly interested in the growing market for wearable computing devices – everything from basic health and fitness trackers to more powerful mobile devices such as smartwatches.

As you’d expect, MediaTek is promoting its own development tools and silicon products, such as Aster, LinkIt, the MT2523 and M7697 as the first choice used for the development of projects and technologies at MediaTek Labs.

The Omate X smartwatch, or the Aster chip itself, can run MediaTek’s LinkIt operating system, which makes the configuration and development of embedded software faster and easier, enabling engineers to bring their ideas and creations to fruition faster.

All these applications and more, including home automation or other Internet-of-Things applications that aren’t necessarily wearables, seem well suited one or more of these products – the Aster system-on-chip, other MediaTek chipsets providing connectivity features such as GPS and Bluetooth Low Energy, and the LinkIt operating system.

If any of these products or ideas are of interest, and you’re looking to introduce your own Internet-of-Things device – there is a method of development that is rapid and successful. Here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a 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.

The new Arduino Create platform aims to make embedded computing and Internet-of-Things development even easier, and an effort to make the popular Arduino development environment more relevant and up-to-date for today’s networked, connected Internet-of-Things applications – and to be easier to use for collaborative development and sharing of projects and open-source resources.

This new platform is intended to replace the widely used and proven Arduino IDE that many people will be familiar with. This system has been around for a decade, with minor revisions along the way – however is basically the same original system, derived from the Wiring platform.

Over time the Arduino IDE has inherited many things, some good and some bad, from this underlying legacy of the Wiring platform – and the Arduino Create platform aims to replace this with a modern, flexible toolchain. One of the most significant changes is that this new development environment will be a Web-based platform, with all the advantages as well as challenges that go along with that.

More than 10 years ago, the Arduino project set out to develop easy-to-use tools to make physical computing accessible and simple, with a focus on open-source software and hardware. Today, the Arduino Create platform aims to continue to remain true to these values in order to bring the same outcomes to the world of Internet-of-Things development, bringing this technology into the hands of teachers, students and creative artists, making the technology accessible for everybody, and serving as “one stop shop for Makers”.

But this new browser-based internet-connected platform is not just a new development environment. It enables everybody, including students, hobbyists, makers and other non-expert users to not just write code easily but also to share their work.

Users can easily configure their hardware, install updates and patches that are easily managed in the cloud, such as support for different board hardware types, and extra software libraries, and connect their networked devices to the cloud, using Web-accessible dashboards and other Internet-based features.

This cloud-based approach includes some clever features, such as the ability to easily “hide” sensitive private API keys and passwords within your code when you share it, and automatically insert this kind of secure information into your code at the preprocessor stage, before the code is uploaded to your board.

Alongside these new development capabilities, the new platform’s focus on community, culture leadership and education around the emerging Internet-of-Things domain is clear. The Arduino “IoT Manifesto” sets out not only how Arduino will approach the Internet of Things, but also how they intend to develop tools for it as well as how they think other parties should approach the way they’re developing their own tools and services for the IoT.

Arduino Create makes it very easy to get started, featuring guided workflows to help easily configure Internet services and to help users through the process of installing the cross-browser plugin. Once the plugin is installed, you can get started writing code and uploading sketches to an Arduino board connected to your computer directly from your web browser, in a way that will be largely familiar on the surface to everybody who has ever used an Arduino.

On the surface the Arduino Web Editor looks a lot like the familiar IDE, only browser-based. All the standard libraries included with Arduino IDE installations are immediately available, along with support for all the standard Arduino hardware targets.

This makes usability easy for new users, with minimal transition required for users who are already familiar with the Arduino IDE. All the significant back-end changes are hidden underneath, with a largely familiar user experience.

The Create platform also includes the Arduino Cloud infrastructure, which allows you to connect your Arduino boards directly to the Internet with ease, using transport protocols such as MQTT to communicate from Arduino devices to Web services and to other devices.

The Arduino Cloud infrastructure as well as the Arduino Web Editor are powered by Amazon Web Services behind the scenes, with AWS IoT and AWS Lambda providing the Arduino Create platform with secure, reliable and highly scalable infrastructure, enabling the platform that enables makers to easily connect and manage their Arduino projects through the internet and the cloud.

Eventually the Arduino Cloud infrastructure will provide Arduino users with a one-stop-shop for Arduino-connected Web services, including real-time data display dashboards, streaming of data and database storage.

The community surrounding the Arduino platform is one of its defining characteristics, and the Arduino Project Hub integrated into the Arduino Create system aims to continue this community-oriented tradition.

The huge amount of open-source code, examples and community support available around the Arduino platform mean that if you have a problem you can probably find somebody else that has had the same problem earlier that can easily help you solve it.

This ecosystem of community support is a key part of the Arduino success story – this has helped make Arduino the default platform for beginners and hobbyists looking to get started with microcontrollers and embedded computing.

The Arduino Create ecosystem builds upon this tradition with the integration of the Arduino Project Hub. The Arduino Project Hub is intended to be the new focus for the extensive community of Arduino users to share their projects, ideas and examples.

Although this may be an exciting development for the hobbyist community, it is not an ideal situation for those looking to design, build and manage their own commercial Internet-of-Things products. This is quite apparent with first use, thanks to the ominous “You may lose your data” warning.

Furthermore, there are many options on the hardware, software and platform fronts that require serious consideration – with security being paramount. Thus you need to discuss your IoT project with professionals from the LX Group.

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 emerging Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) standard is a wireless technology designed especially for enabling cellular connectivity to Internet-of-Things devices, and is designed to combine long-range mobile connectivity with compatibility with existing LTE mobile network infrastructure and low power consumption for sensors or other long-lived devices.

As the NB-IoT standard is specifically aimed at enabling cellular low-power, wide-area (LPWA) wireless networks, targeted at machine-to-machine and IoT applications such as environmental and agricultural monitoring and the metering and automated reading of utilities such as water and power meters.

Furthermore, NB-IoT aims to provide reliable, wide-area network coverage, low power consumption, and strong scalability with support for very large numbers of devices on the network. This interesting new standard has been under active development during the last two years by several major players in the telecoms and networks industry – including Qualcomm, Huawei and Vodafone.

Vodafone believes the emerging NB-IoT standard will be the “killer” technology in the LPWA wireless IoT race, beating alternative technologies such as SigFox and LoRa. Vodafone is one of the key players in the NB-IoT forum, an industry association established last year to advance the development of narrowband IoT technology.

NB-IoT is one of several wireless technologies that aim to overcome the power and therefore transmission range limitations of alternative wireless networking technologies for LPWA Internet-of-Things applications. NB-IoT is a licensed-spectrum technology, unlike alternatives such as SigFox and LoRa which rely on unlicensed, or class-licensed, RF spectrum.

Although the use of unlicensed spectrum means that other LPWA technologies do not require a specific spectrum allocation and therefore are cheaper and easier for service providers to deploy, the limited bandwidth, relatively high congestion and limited transmission power in these radio bands limits the range and performance of the network.

With more and more wireless electronic devices in use everywhere, congestion in the unlicensed ISM radio bands is only going to get even worse in the future, NB-IoT hopes to overcome these limitations, in part by using licensed spectrum allocations like the rest of the mobile network.

The next generation of wide-area wireless IoT is a competitive field, with LoRa representing a more “open” system using unlicensed (but relatively congested) radio spectrum, and so far this has attracted support from many telecommunications service providers and operators including French operators Orange and Bouygues Telecom.

SigFox is also continually growing, with claims that they are presently deploying or operating networks in 17 countries. NB-IoT is still lagging slightly behind in this regard, with no widespread commercial deployment yet.

Vodafone has chosen to throw its weight behind NB-IoT instead of the competing technologies, however. Vodafone, in partnership with Chinese equipment supplier Huawei Technologies, which is another major NB-IoT backer, has recently opened a dedicated lab for NB-IoT development at its Newbury, UK headquarters.

NB-IoT Forum members, and other developers and organisations looking to use the NB-IoT standard to support commercial services, will now be able to test their applications at Vodafone’s new facility.

And with the backing of Vodafone, Huawei and other major industry players – NB-IoT is now in the process of being adopted as an official standard within the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP), with the expectation that it will be finalised and included in LTE release 13 later this year.

There have been some delays in this process, however, and there have been suggestions that NB-IoT will not be finalised in time for Release 13, instead slipping to Release 14 at some point in the future.

This has the potential to be a significant setback for the nascent technology, slowing down its widespread acceptance industry-wide, as well as allowing extra time for competing LPWA technologies such as LoRa and SigFox to continue to grow, with more deployments, bigger networks, and greater provider and end-user familiarity with these technologies.

One of the factors behind Vodafone’s support for NB-IoT is its strong cost-effectiveness for providers who have already built and operated modern mobile networks. Vodafone claims that 80 to 90 percent of their currently deployed base stations use Huawei’s SingleRAN technology for their Radio Access Network (RAN).

SingleRAN technology uses software-defined radio to allow a single network to support multiple different mobile telecommunications standards without hardware replacements, making it cheaper and easier to keep up with new developments in mobile communications standards.

The easy integration of NB-IoT into the existing LTE mobile ecosystem, and its compatibility with LTE network infrastructure without new hardware deployments, are features that make it particularly attractive to established providers in the mobile communications sector.

For mobile network operators that maintain older base stations that have not yet been upgraded to LTE, however, moving to networks that can support NB-IoT may be a more expensive and slow process.

Nevertheless, NB-IoT is coming 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.

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