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The Lightweight Machine-to-Machine Enabler (LWM2M) is a new standard for the management of devices in machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things applications. LWM2M is particularly aimed at resource-constrained end-node devices in applications such as Wireless Sensor Networks as well as Machine-to-Machine applications where bandwidth is constrained – for example where cellular connectivity is used to network remote devices.

Many devices in the growing industrial and commercial M2M and Internet-of-Things markets require some device management – devices need to be remotely switched on and off, woken up and put to sleep, sent remote requests for sensor data transmission, configured, provisioned, or remotely updated with new firmware.

In short, these devices call for protocols and services to effectively support them with device management, service enablement and application management. The design goal of LWM2M was to create a mechanism that is not only suitable for relatively powerful devices like smartphones or Wi-Fi routers, but also caters to the needs of more constrained devices – end-node IoT devices with low-cost hardware, with very limited memory or CPU capability, or devices that run off batteries with very low power budgets.

LWM2M is being developed by the Open Mobile Alliance – a collaboration of many companies working in the M2M service provider, software, hardware and system vendor space. For example ARM and Sensinode are just a couple of the companies involved in the Alliance.

As LWM2M is built on top of open standards defined by groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, it allows for interoperability between different devices and manufacturers, avoiding lock-in to proprietary standards.

For example, the LWM2M protocol stack is built on top of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), which is an open IETF standard, as the underlying transfer protocol that is carried over UDP or SMS. CoAP is optimised for communications in resource-constrained or bandwidth-constrained network environments, which makes it well suited to Internet-of-Things applications, enabling the use of low-cost microcontrollers in prolific network-connected devices.

The decoupling of machine-to-machine products from their proprietary, vendor-specific management systems through the adoption of open interfaces and open standards can, theoretically at least, also accelerate innovation in the M2M/IoT markets both on the device side and on the server side.

In essence, LWM2M is a communications protocol running between LWM2M software clients running on all sorts of embedded end-node devices and LWM2M servers running on the M2M management platforms for these devices. The LWM2M protocol includes robust security of all communications between the client and the server using Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which provides a secure channel between the LWM2M client and the server for all messages interchanged.

The DTLS security modes supported by LWM2M include both pre-shared-key and public-key modes, providing support for robust security across both more capable embedded devices as well as very resource-constrained devices where public-key authentication is not practical.

LWM2M supports UDP binding with both CoAP and SMS, meaning that communication between the LWM2M server and the client can happen over SMS or CoAP, and low-cost basic cellular modems that can communicate over SMS without Internet connectivity can be used to build LWM2M networks.

This also means that LWM2M-equipped networks can be deployed almost anywhere in the field, without the need for modern Internet-capable telco mobile network infrastructure – the network only needs to be able to support SMS messaging.

LWM2M provides an extensible object model that enables application data exchanges in addition to the core device management features such as firmware updates and connectivity monitoring.

A RESTful style of architecture is applied to this, where the items to be managed on a remote device are considered “resources”. Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs addresses these resources on the network, which are much like the familiar URLs used on the Web.

Built-in resource discovery is supported using the CoRE Link Format standard, making the discovery of new resources on the network relatively easy. Related resources are grouped together into Objects, and this helps to cut down on processing overhead as the M2M client and the server on the platform side have a common understanding of what a certain resource actually is, by understanding the properties of an object that it is a part of – for example the manufacturer’s name, the type of network the device is currently connected to, the signal strengths of the cellular connection it uses, or other relevant properties.

Though the LWM2M specification comes with a set of predefined objects and resources, the set of objects is extensible. This means that other organisations and users can define new objects that are most suitable for their products and services in their particular corners of the M2M market.

The Open Mobile Alliance provides their LWM2M DevKit in the form of an add-on plugin for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, which is an implementation of the Lightweight M2M protocol, which enables you to directly interact with a LWM2M server from the Web browser on your PC.

This allows developers and users to easily get started, to interactively explore and comprehend this new protocol for machine-to-machine communication.

However if you are interested in upgrading existing products or developing new M2M-capable devices that could benefit from this new lightweight M2M initiative, getting started is easy. We invite you to join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – 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.

Today, Internet-of-Things and wireless-sensor networks are finding an increasing range uses of consumer, industrial and medical applications. Such networks often employ a large number of distributed nodes, without interconnecting cables, which can’t practically be connected to the power grid – and it is attractive to keep the need for battery recharging and replacement to an absolute minimum through the use of efficient, careful design choices as well as ambient energy harvesting technology.

Power-efficient wireless sensor nodes can take advantage of some form of energy harvesting power supply, employing energy sources such as solar photovoltaic, vibrational energy harvesters or thermoelectric generators to minimise maintenance and extend battery life – possibly completely eliminating batteries entirely – if the power consumption of the system is small enough and a capacitor is employed for energy storage.

Energy harvesting management ICs that manage the accumulation of energy in a capacitor over a period of time to enable short bursts of relatively high power consumption, such as when a node wakes up and transmits a burst of data, are particularly well suited to low-power wireless sensor nodes.

In many applications, solar photovoltaic are the most familiar choice for low-power sensor and telemetry nodes operating outdoors, for example in agricultural and meteorological applications.

Energy-efficient wireless network nodes can be engineered using modern RF microcontroller system-on-chip devices, turning on and off sensors and peripheral hardware devices when they are not required or putting them into low-power sleep modes when not actively in use.

Similarly, the RF transceiver can be switched into a very-low-power sleep state until the microcontroller decides that a transmission of collected sensor data is required. The microcontroller can then wake up the radio, perform the required transmission, and the radio goes back to sleep.

In some cases, a burst of data transmission across the wireless network might only occur when a small, intermittent energy-harvesting power supply has accumulated enough energy in a capacitor to power a transmission.

With most of the components of the system – the microcontroller, radio and sensors – each kept offline or asleep for the largest practical amount of time, efficiently designed wireless sensor nodes may achieve operating timescales as long as years off a single battery.

Today’s typical wireless RF microcontroller system-on-chips targeted at Internet-of-Things applications typically consume about 1-5 microwatts in their “sleep” state, increasing to about 0.5-1.0 milliwatts with the microcontroller active, and up to about 50 milliwatts for brief periods during active radio transmission.

As an example of the active development in this field, the International Electrotechnical Commission has recently ratified the new ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 standard, specifying a Wireless-Short-Packet protocol optimised for ultra-low-power and energy-harvesting nodes in wireless sensor networks.

It is the first and only existing standard for wireless applications that is also optimised for energy harvesting solutions, aimed at energy-harvesting wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks with ultra-low power consumption.

For a small, low-power embedded device that receives a reasonable amount of sun each day, a moderately small solar panel is perfectly capable of supplying sufficient power, on average, to run a small, basic wireless network node consisting of a microcontroller, some sensors and an embedded low-power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or 802.15.4/ZigBee radio transceiver.

In many applications, solar photovoltaic is the most familiar, relatively mature choice for low-power network nodes operating outdoors or under good indoor light conditions. However, other technologies suitable for harvesting small amounts of power from the ambient environment exist. For example, a wireless sensor node set up to monitor bearing wear in a generator could employ a piezoelectric crystal as a vibrational energy harvester, converting motor vibration into usable energy.

As an example of a controller IC one may use for the power supply in a small solar powered system, the Linear Technology LTC3105 is a high-efficiency step-up DC/DC converter that can operate from input voltages as low as 225 millivolts, with a built-in maximum power point controller (MPPC). As well as solar cells, this device is well suited to other low voltage, high impedance energy harvesting transducers such as thermoelectric generators.

For some systems it is also practical to use batteries alone – for example, lithium-ion, lithium-polymer or nickel metal-hydride batteries – and rely on user intervention to simply recharge and replace the batteries where needed.

Lithium-ion batteries provide good energy density and many convenient cycles of repeated charge and discharge, but these batteries require precise control to avoid over-discharge or over-charge conditions which can permanently damage the battery.

Despite their risk of fire and damage if mishandled, lithium-ion batteries provide very good discharge current capability, high energy density, and the ability to survive many repeated charge cycles embedded inside devices which are charged and used without their battery being replaced.

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, making WaspMote one good example of a hardware and software platform that is well suited to the use of solar power and other energy harvesting technologies in energy-efficient wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of the options available to ensure your IoT nodes are powered effectively, and here at the LX Group we have the experience and expertise to solve your IoT power problems right through to a whole system to meet your needs.

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

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

The new PSoC-4 BLE series of programmable system-on-chip devices from Cypress enables system designers to create low-power, sensor-based wirelessly-connected systems using integrated programmable analogue front ends, programmable digital peripherals – industry-leading CapSense touch sensor capability for user interfaces all integrated together with a Bluetooth 4.0 (Bluetooth Low Energy) radio and an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller in a compact and cost-effective single-chip solution.

This highly-integrated one-chip Bluetooth Low Energy platform enables you to easily design low-power, wirelessly-connected solutions that are particularly well suited to real-time, low-power Internet-of-Things applications.

Bluetooth Low Energy has several potential benefits over Wi-Fi in some wireless connectivity applications, including minimal connection latency and very good energy efficiency, allowing for “always-on” smart, connected devices that run off small batteries for many months or even more than a year while seamlessly being embedded into everyday physical objects and the environment around us.

This makes the platform ideal for IoT end-node applications despite offering data rate and throughput that is lower than in Wi-Fi-based solutions. By combining the Bluetooth Low Energy radio with a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 processor in a single chip and adding flexible general-purpose analogue and digital peripherals – the PSoC 4 BLE platform aims to provide the right combination of processing horsepower and low power consumption with flexible and precise interfaces for external peripherals such as ADCs and sensors.

You can interface your Bluetooth-connected system with multiple different sensors easily by integrating custom analogue front ends and programmable digital peripherals around the high-performance 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0 processor core, with no need for any extra chips.

The PSoC 4 BLE platform includes the Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol Stack and Profiles in an intuitive and easy-to-use GUI-based configuration tool, simplifying the design of your BLE systems. The PSoC 4 BLE chipsets reduce the complexity of RF antenna-matching network design by including an integrated balun, which also helps reduce the component count and the PCB footprint of your system.

A PSoC 4 BLE development kit has been designed by Cypress to allow for maximum flexibility in your design whilst also being as easy to use as possible and offering compatibility with standard Arduino-compatible “shields” when used in conjunction with appropriate software.

This development kit is built around easy to use PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC (Programmable Radio-on-Chip) BLE development modules which are complete, self-contained systems that include the main chip with all its I/O pins exposed for development, a tuned PCB antenna on board, power circuitry and easy access to programming pins.

You can simply hook up some sensors, LEDs and a coin-cell battery and you’re ready to go with your complete single-chip Bluetooth LE-enabled wireless sensor network device with analogue and digital acquisition on board. You can even design reliable, sophisticated and sleek user interfaces with Cypress’ CapSense capacitive touch-sensing technology, delivering superior noise immunity, water tolerance and proximity sensing in touch-sensitive applications such as user control panels.

Furthermore, these modules are FCC certified, so they can be deployed in your commercial products without requiring the certification that you may require for a bespoke RF design to meet FCC Part 15 regulatory requirements. These Cypress PSoC 4 BLE modules also meet CE and Canadian RSS-210 radio certification standards, so they’re ready to go into these markets in your commercial designs.

The Bluetooth Low Energy Pioneer Kit from Cypress enables customers to evaluate and develop BLE projects using the Cypress PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE devices. The low-cost BLE Pioneer Kit includes example projects for common BLE profiles and example smartphone apps for both iOS and Android with full source code provided, allowing you to get up and running in no time with the development of Bluetooth Low Energy solutions for IoT applications.

You can design complete, sensor-based BLE systems easily with Cypress PSoC Creator, taking advantage of its vast catalogue of pre-characterised and production ready PSoC firmware “components” which enable you to concurrently design hardware and firmware with easy drag-and-drop assembly of modular software. For example, the Bluetooth Low Energy 4.1 specification has been abstracted into the new Bluetooth Smart “component” in PSoC Creator.

The Cypress PSoC 4 BLE development kit includes a Bluetooth Low Energy USB dongle that pairs with the CySmart BLE master emulation tool from Cypress, converting your Windows PC into a powerful Bluetooth LE debugging environment.

The kit design and layout allows for customers to easily develop embedded solutions that require both mixed-signal analog and digital capabilities along with wireless Bluetooth LE connectivity and highly optimised power efficiency without sacrificing microcontroller performance.

The development kit supports system-level designs using the Cypress PSoC Creator development environment, which includes numerous example projects to enable you to get started creating Bluetooth Low Energy connected, mixed-signal analogue embedded designs such as wireless sensor networks and IoT product designs as easily and as quickly as possible.

If this platform is of interest to your organisation – and you need an experienced partner to progress with – 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 ARM group has recently announced the new ARM mbed IoT Device Platform and an accompanying free operating system, aiming to build on top of the existing mbed embedded development ecosystem to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of your new Internet-of-Things connected products.

For the uninitiated, mbed is “a platform for developing smart devices that are based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. It is designed to provide a highly productive solution for rapid prototyping and product development, with a focus on connected Internet of Things devices.

It is a project developed by ARM, its technology partners and a community of core developers, and it is used by tens of thousands of professional developers to create intelligent products that take advantage of the power of modern microcontrollers and connectivity” (from Wikipedia).

The new mbed platform has been built around open standards and aims to bring Internet protocols, security, standards-based manageability and interoperability together into one integrated solution optimised for the development of cost-constrained and energy-constrained connected devices with the power of ARM’s popular 32-bit processor technology.

The ARM mbed IoT Device Platform is supported by the established and growing mbed hardware and software ecosystem that will provide common building blocks for IoT devices and services. This new platform aims to accelerate the growth of the Internet-of-Things market by enabling innovators to focus on value-add features and differentiation in their product, spending less time on the core processor and connectivity requirements.

The platform is built around the free mbed operating system for ARM processors and devices based around them, and the mbed Device Server, which is analogous to a Web server that accepts connections from Web browsers, but instead it handles the connections from embedded Internet-of-Things devices. The new mbed OS aims to consolidate the fundamental building blocks of the IoT into one integrated set of software components.

The mbed IoT operating system is a modern full-stack operating system that is designed specifically for the popular ARM Cortex-M based 32-bit microcontrollers. Optimised for energy efficiency, connectivity, security and reusable software functionality, as well as being available at no cost, the OS aims to become a foundation that enables widespread innovation in the IoT space.

The mbed OS contains security, communication and device management features to enable the development of production-grade, energy-efficient IoT products.

The mbed Device Server, which is available now, aims to be a key enabler for cloud service providers, operators and enterprises to access the growing IoT market with production deployments, bringing end node devices into the world of web services.

The scalable, industrial-strength mbed Device Server supports the protocols, behaviours and security requirements of IoT devices, making them accessible through APIs to enterprise software, web applications and cloud stacks.

mbed Device Server brings web services to the most demanding enterprise applications in the Internet of Things, utilising open-source protocols such as CoAP/HTTP, MQTT, TLS/TCP, and DTLS/UDP for data communication and device management.

Device Server is a software product that provides the required server-side technologies to connect and manage devices in a secure way, and also provides a bridge between protocols such as MQTT or CoAP that are suited for use in IoT devices and the APIs that are used by web developers.

This simplifies the integration of IoT devices that provide “little data” into cloud frameworks that deploy “big data” analytics on the aggregated data, with the scalability to handle the connections and management of millions of devices.

The mbed IoT Device Platform also incorporates the mbed.org Web community, a central website and a community of more than 70,000 developers working with the mbed platform, providing a comprehensive database of hardware development kits, a repository for reusable software components, reference applications, documentation and Web-based development tools.

The mbed developer website hosts all the development tools you need within a Cloud-based Web IDE to give you quick access wherever you are; it is already configured, requires no installation, and will stay up-to-date whenever you decide to use it.

Software development has come a long way in a short time, driven by the innovation around the productive programming frameworks, tools and workflows of the Web era, and mbed is bringing these modern tools and design patterns into the world of embedded development with up-to-date, modern workflows and tools inspired by the Web development community.

Inspired by the highly productive programming frameworks, tools and collaborative workflows of the web, it is time to bring embedded development up-to-date. The mbed team is developing free and reliable command-line build, component management and test tools, and a Web IDE and developer web services that help bootstrap your embedded development with the accessibility and productivity one would expect in other programming or software development domains.

These new tools comprise a platform toolkit that can handle the complexity and collaboration requirements of the IoT, enabling you to build complex applications from well-tested software components and to collaboratively develop and improve those components.

The Web-based mbed IDE includes features such as workspace version control, code formatting and auto-generation of documentation for published libraries. You can publish projects directly from your private workspace to the developer website to share code openly with the community if you choose, or pull existing libraries into your workspace to get a head start on your project.

The mbed platform offers 32-bit power to your embedded hardware along with an easy point-of-entry, allowing you to work with powerful hardware and IoT product design. As another option for your existing or new IoT-enabled project, our experienced award-winning engineering team can harness mbed for your success.

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

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