All posts tagged: jot

The new Edison development platform is the latest in a series of low-cost and product-ready, general purpose computing platforms from Intel that aim to help lower the barriers to entry for all entrepreneurs, from hobbyists and makers to professional engineers and companies working with Internet-of-Things, wearable computing and consumer electronics applications and product development.

The Edison platform includes a robust set of features into its small size, delivering great performance, durability, and a broad spectrum of hardware I/O interfaces and software support. Those versatile features help meet the needs of a wide range of customers and market segments.

Although announced some time ago, the platform is finally in the retail market, which has waited patiently as the Edison packs a large amount of computing power, communications and networking capability into a small, compact package – including an Intel Atom dual-core system-on-chip, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy, along with a 70-pin miniature Hirose connector that exposes many GPIO pins and a wide range of different I/O interfaces for connectivity with external hardware.

With these features in mind, Edison is potentially a very useful platform for many of today’s networked, connected embedded computing and Internet-of-Things applications where more computing power is required than can be supplied by a typical low-cost microcontroller along with wireless connectivity.

Edison’s versatile features help this new computing platform to meet the needs of beginners to embedded computing, inventors and makers, as well as experienced users and of course a multitude of commercial applications.

Apart from the integrated hardware, thanks to the 70-pin connector there’s support for more than 30 different industry-standard hardware I/O interfaces – simplifying planning for and integration with peripheral devices and other hardware.

From a software perspective, Edison features out-of-the-box compatibility and support with software and tools such as Yocto Linux, the Arduino IDE, and the Python, Node.js and Wolfram languages. The Edison’s Intel Atom system-on-chip includes a dual-core CPU and an independent single-core microcontroller, integrated memory and storage.

You may be thinking that all this is great, however Edison isn’t suitable for portable applications due to a perceived power issue. Nothing could be further from the truth – although there’s a powerful dual-core processor, WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy radios on board – it offers low power consumption and a small physical footprint.

Thus the Edison platform is attractive for applications that need a lot of processing power without the size or power consumption constraints of a larger PC or single-board computer. In standby mode with no RF communication, Edison’s power consumption is just 13 milliwatts, increasing to 22 milliwatts with Bluetooth LE active, or 35 milliwatts when Wi-Fi networking is enabled.

The core of Edison is its’ Intel Atom system-on-chip that includes a modern dual-core, dual-threaded 500 MHz CPU along with an independent 32-bit 100 MHz Intel Quark microcontroller, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, 4 Gb of EMMC non-volatile storage and 1 Gb of DDR3 memory – all in a tiny module the size of a postage stamp – ideal for Internet-of-Things applications.

The unique combination of small size, energy efficiency, computing power and storage, rich capabilities and ecosystem support provided by the Edison module and its surrounding ecosystem of modular hardware blocks inspires creativity and enables rapid innovation from prototype to production for professional, hobbyist or education users.

Created to facilitate rapid innovation, prototyping and product development, Edison can be configured to be interoperable with just about any device, allowing you to quickly prototype simple interactive designs or tackle more complex projects with an embedded computer that offers much more power, on-board storage and networking capability than a simple 8-bit microcontroller.

Furthermore, the Edison platform also supports connectivity to Intel’s new Internet-of-Things Analytics Platform, which enables seamless device-to-device and device-to-cloud communications for your connected devices in Internet-of-Things applications.

However Intel doesn’t just leave you with hardware – their IoT Analytics Platform provides a range of foundational tools for collecting, storing and processing data from your Internet-of-Things networks and devices in the cloud, and for example provides the ability to run user-defined rules on your data stream that trigger alerts based on advanced analytics on the data coming in from your devices.

Overall the Edison offers the product designer an incredible range of hardware possibilities from a reputable brand that knows the business. However implementing your IoT or other product with Edison can be a challenge to get right the first time.

However you can remove the challenge of development by working with experienced partners such as our team here at the LX Group. We have the team, knowledge and experience to bring your ideas to life.

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

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.

AllJoyn is an open-source project that aims to let compatible smart “things” around us in Internet-of-Things networks recognise each other and share resources and information across brands, networks and operating systems in an interoperable way.

Initially developed by the Qualcomm Innovation Centre, it is now a collaborative open-source project of the AllSeen Alliance – a non-profit consortium providing open-source Internet-of-Things solutions aimed at enabling widespread adoption of products, systems and services for what they call the “Internet of Everything”.

Their goal is to provide portable open-source software and frameworks for all major platforms and operating systems and creating elegant and accessible solutions for the smart home, its appliances and its gadgets.

As an open, universal, secure and programmable software and services framework, AllJoyn enables hardware manufacturers and software developers to create interoperable products that can discover, connect and communicate with other products enabled with AllJoyn support.

These frameworks enable discovery and communication with devices nearby, with the Notification Service Framework making it easy for products or devices to broadcast and receive basic communications such as text, images, video or audio from other AllJoyn-enabled devices in the area.

AllJoyn events allow for effective management of machine-to-machine interactions, with events and corresponding actions on one device that are discoverable and can be linked together to respond and execute on another AllJoyn-enabled device.

This platform aims to give manufacturers and developers the tools they need to invent new ways for smart things to work together, recognising that homes, cars and the things around us are getting smarter, and smart devices are becoming more numerous, every day.

The AllJoyn Core Framework includes a set of service frameworks that are designed to address the desire for users to interact with their nearby things, in a way that is very simple and easy to use. AllJoyn’s universal software framework and core set of system services enable interoperability among connected products and software applications across different manufacturers and vendors to create dynamic proximal networks – focused only on the Internet-of-Things devices that are in your proximity, in particular, rather than all those Internet-connected devices and things that are mostly not directly relevant to you.

Thus AllJoyn aims to enable manufacturers to offer interoperable products and services that will engage and delight users in new, exciting and useful ways. AllJoyn is designed to be a powerful engine for enabling peer-to-peer experiences across connected devices, appliances and more.

This can be enabled over a range of consumer products being limited only by your imagination – from the mobile devices that consumers always have with them, to the appliances and media equipment in the home, to the electronics in cars and the office equipment in the workplace.

With AllJoyn you can significantly reduce the time, effort and cost of adding peer-to-peer features to your application. Whether you are developing for a smartphone, tablet, television, PC or embedded consumer electronics, AllJoyn is designed to provide the connectivity to enable groundbreaking new experiences.

The tools are provided to enable the Internet-of-Things developer to add proximal peer-to-peer connectivity to your applications, from gaming, entertainment and social media to automation and enterprise applications, and empowers multiple people on different devices to share, interact and collaborate in real time, enhancing the user experience by asking others to join in the experience – from multiplayer games to business productivity tools, social networking, and “smart” home and building automation applications.

The ability of devices enabled by AllJoyn to send and receive notifications to other devices mean that devices in building automation or smart home applications can be controlled by data sources other than PCs or mobile devices.

For example, devices can be controlled by and communicate with AllJoyn-enabled wearable computing devices such as Qualcomm’s Toq smartwatch. AllJoyn dynamically discovers and learns what nearby devices have specific interfaces and capabilities, for example allowing an AllJoyn service to detect all nearby AllJoyn-enabled devices with a built-in clock or timer and synchronising their time, all together at the same time.

Because AllJoyn is proximal and does not need to go out over the Internet to a cloud service it is very fast and responsive, with no lag or latency, and without outside Internet connectivity being essential.

Smart AllJoyn gateways can detect and manage every AllJoyn-enabled device and app on a network, as well as controlling how much bandwidth each app and device gets, ensuring that everyone and every device gets the best connected experience.

With the AllJoyn ON application, it allows for easy discovery, connection and control of any AllJoyn devices nearby, and the AllJoyn Control Panel service framework allows devices with simple or limited user interfaces to expose their properties and controls via a remote, virtual, control panel.

Those properties and controls can be dynamically rendered on a display such as a smartphone or tablet, for a richer user experience on devices that would not usually provide a rich user interface. The Control Panel service running on a device allows it to expose its capabilities to a control panel application running on a smartphone or tablet, which can use this data to render a graphical user interface for that device in a way that is completely independent of the manufacturer or device type.

This virtual control panel can even expose controls with no direct physical analogs, allowing simple devices with limited physical UI to offer much deeper user interaction and convenience.

The AllJoyn framework allows for proximity peer-to-peer interaction over various transport layers. It is written in C++ at its core, and provides multiple different language bindings and complete reference implementations across various operating systems and chipsets, making it easy for developers to get started.

Furthermore this provides an object-oriented approach to making peer-to-peer networking between connected devices easier, allowing developers to avoid the need to deal with lower-level network protocols and hardware.

As the market for Internet-of-Things increases, and the various growth of platform options such as AllJoyn appear, selecting the right platform for your application can be a nightmare. However with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the AllJoyn platform up and running – or right through to the final product. We can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

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.

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.

The panStamp development environment for wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications is based around compact, low-cost microcontroller boards including a built-in sub-gigahertz radio transceiver, providing the necessary connectivity and processing power to create autonomous low-power wireless sensor and actuator nodes with almost everything contained in a 24-pin DIP module that is compact, low-cost, easy to program and to use.

It’s easy for anybody to get started with the open-source panStamp platform, allowing you to measure almost anything by connecting a panStamp up to some sensors, connecting a small battery, writing some simple Arduino-compatible code and transmitting data wirelessly, providing a convenient solution for any kind of project needing low-power wireless communications or telemetry, such as home automation, energy metering, robot control or weather monitoring.

The panStamp platform makes it easy and accessible to get started creating wireless sensor networks and other wireless systems for both professional and hobbyist users.

Modules are very easy to program and configure, and they can be plugged into many different kinds of commercially available base boards containing different sensors, actuators and power supplies, or the user can develop their own custom base-board hardware to meet their needs, with all the complexity of the microcontroller and radio hardware contained on the panStamp module.

Wireless boards run a compact stack and communicate with each other using a simple protocol called SWAP, using the 868 or 915 MHz ISM radio bands, offering lower congestion and longer range compared to 2.4 GHz solutions. The lightweight, open-source SWAP protocol that powers the panStamp radio stack is designed for use with Texas Instruments CC11xx radio hardware in resource-constrained wireless sensor network and machine-to-machine applications, typically consuming only about 7kB of flash and less than 1kB of RAM.

Everything has been designed to perform efficiently, quickly and with good power efficiency with one of the most compact wireless stacks on the market, allowing developers to focus on their applications without worrying about low-level details of the microcontroller and radio implementation.

However, the platform is all free and open-source, so those details of low-level implementation are available for developers to look at if you want to. The panStamp project provides a complete solution to allow you to build wireless sensor networks that are connected to the cloud – not only microcontroller and sensor boards, but also the communications stack, protocol definitions, network controller and management tools to get your network of sensors up and running and connected to cloud services.

From the data collection and actuation to transmission, data management, event handling and IP tunnelling, panStamp aims to provide easy connectivity of wireless devices to cloud services and other Internet-of-Things services in a way that is accessible regardless of your technical background.

Most of the core features of panStamps hardware, such as power management, the real-time clock and the RF transceiver are controlled inside the panStamp library, so the user doesn’t have to deal with the
low-level programming required to control these hardware peripherals. To consider some of the standard base-boards available for use with panStamp modules, a good starting point is panStick, which is a USB-connected motherboard for panStamps.

The panStick is used to program panStamps, and also acts as a serial gateway from your PC to the wireless network. You simply place a panStamp on the panStick, program the panStamp with the modem application, and plug the dongle into your computer. This is the simplest way to connect panStamp RF networks to any software on your PC, including the SWAPdmt device management tool for SWAP networks and the Lagarto software for cloud service connectivity.

The panStamp shield for Raspberry Pi adds connectivity to panStamp radio networks on the Raspberry Pi via its UART, combining low-power wireless connectivity with the Pi’s Ethernet or 802.11 networking and more powerful computing capacity, providing a gateway from the panStamp network to the Internet without the size or power consumption of a traditional PC.

This shield essentially provides the Raspberry Pi with an RF “modem”, as well as providing a DS1338 real-time clock with battery backup to allow the Raspberry Pi to keep the current time without power or network connectivity.

The panStamp AVR module is based around an Atmel ATmega328P microcontroller and TI CC1101 radio transceiver, and is fully compatible with the Arduino bootloader and IDE. Developers can create their own programs and upload them to panStamps using the standard Arduino IDE, making the panStamp platform very accessible and easy for everybody to get started with, especially if you have previous Arduino experience.

The more powerful, advanced panStamp NRG module is based around the TI CC430F5137, which combines TI’s MSP430 low-power 16-bit microcontroller with a sub-gigahertz radio transceiver on the die, providing a neat, single-chip, power-efficient solution for sub-gigahertz wireless sensor networks.

The panStamp NRG module is fully compatible with the Energia IDE, a port of the Arduino IDE for the Texas Instruments MSP430/Stellaris microcontroller family. This allows the developer to easily get started with software development for these relatively powerful 16-bit, power-efficient microcontrollers with the same ease of use and same language and development environment that will be familiar to Arduino users.

The radio hardware used in panStamps can typically achieve a transmission range of about 200 meters in open spaces at 38400 bps and 0 dB transmission power, using only a small wire antenna. Using higher transmission power configurations, external high-gain antennas connected to the SMA connector available on panStamp boards, or slower bit rates, it is likely that substantially larger transmission distances could be achieved if this is what your application requires.

The Lagarto software platform allows you to monitor and control panStamp devices remotely from your PC or Raspberry Pi, process the data coming in from your network of devices and deliver it out to the network or the Internet using different mechanisms, for example for connectivity to cloud services. Lagarto is an open automation platform for use with SWAP networks, panStamps and other low-power wireless sensor network technologies, connecting SWAP networks to the IP domain and to the Internet. It is a lightweight solution, designed to run on low-power LAN connected platforms such as embedded plug computers and the Raspberry Pi. Lagarto’s extended automation module has the capability to run complex tasks locally and also connect local networks to remote data services.

Furthermore the cosm, GroveStreams, ThingSpeak and openSense Internet-of-Things web services are currently supported with connectivity to Lagarto out of the box at the present time, with support for new platforms likely to be added in the future.

Also, panStamps are now officially supported in OpenRemote, a powerful open-source home automation software for iOS and Android devices. One of the major attractive features of OpenRemote is the capacity for anyone to create custom graphic layouts for their preferred mobile platforms for free using OpenRemote’s online designer, uploading the generated files to a computer running OpenRemote Controller and have these custom controller layouts on their mobile device interoperable with a wide range of automation hardware including but not limited to panStamps.

Thanks to the open-source nature and low hardware cost of this platform, it’s simple to get prototypes of IoT systems up and running – which also translates to lowering the cost of the system development through to the final product. However if you need any form of guidance from consulting through to end-product manufacturing and support – we can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

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.

GroveStreams is a powerful cloud platform that provides storage and analytics for the Internet of Things, providing Big Data analytics in the cloud and allowing you to capture, analyse and make decisions on data as it arrives. This essentially provides powerful decision-making capabilities to many users and devices and allows you to easily aggregate, visualise and analyse data arriving from many different sensors and data sources.

The included data-streaming analytics are designed to scale to meet your demand for data, so that your business or organisation can quickly react to changes in the data environment – and changes in the physical sensor environment – as those changes are happening. GroveStreams isn’t just built to allow you react to data, it’s also built to allow your devices to react accordingly by using the open, platform independent, GroveStreams API.

The proliferation of devices that generate data in wireless sensor networks, environmental sensing, home and building automation, and Internet-of-Things applications and systems increases every day, and GroveStreams offers a system that can effectively capture, analyse and react to these emerging Big Data sources in a timely manner, with cloud-based scalability and reliability.

GroveStreams is an open cloud-based platform that any organisation, user or device can take advantage of, with an open API and free accounts for low-traffic hobbyist, experimenter or evaluation users. The platform specialises in capturing, analysing and acting on large amounts of time-series data points and streams, with the ability to manage large numbers of different data streams for each organisation.

Each stream can store over 60 million data points or samples, meaning that a stream of sensor data collected once per second can be logged continuously for just under two years in a single continuous data stream.

The GroveStreams platform provides sample timing accurate to the millisecond, and support for many different data types such as integers and floating-point numbers with user-defined physical units, text strings, dates and times and geographic coordinates, along with actionable data analytics such as user-defined roll-ups of data over time, interval gap detection to allow you to monitor the quality and reliability of sensor data streams as they arrive, data streams that are derived from internal or external RSS feeds, calculations and basic statistical processing on data streams, and derived data streams that are derived from arithmetical or statistical operations on other streams of sensor data.

For example, a stream of temperature data in degrees Fahrenheit may be generated by taking another data stream which receives temperature measurements in degrees Celsius from a sensor and applying a mathematical transformation to this stream, or a stream of energy use data from an energy sensor might be multiplied by another stream containing real-time energy pricing information (cents per kilowatt-hour) derived from an RSS feed, allowing an accurate measurement of accumulated energy cost.

GroveStreams provides for the easy aggregation of large numbers of different data streams, and customisable drag-and-drop HTML dashboarding for flexible, customisable dashboarding and visualisation of your data streams, along with live charts and grids which can be embedded within external Web pages, allowing embedding of data displays within external web pages – although they are still served from the GroveStreams cloud infrastructure.

New components and streams can register themselves automatically and appear in existing dashboards and aggregation analytics as they upload their initial feed data, minimising the need for difficult configuration of new components and streams to connect them into existing dashboards or analytics.

All components and streams provide their own RSS feeds, and RSS feeds can be added to your custom dashboards for viewing within the dashboards. It is also possible to configure sensor-driven, data-driven event monitoring with customisable HTTP call, email or SMS notifications – in response to sensor readings and data values, or in response to time-series trends and statistics derived from your data.

GroveStreams also provides Maps functionality, allowing you to spatially map your data from networks of devices that are equipped with GPS or other capability for location awareness. Distances between devices, speeds, and locations can be tracked and mapped, as well as being subject to all the processing techniques applicable to other data streams. And by providing user role-based security, with public/private web UI settings, you can make your organisation accessible to only your users or also to anonymous guest users, with the ability to set guest access rights to control the way that public users work with your data.

Futhermore a RESTful API is provided with almost all the functionality of GroveStreams exposed out via the public API, including fine-grained API access security. Basic examples to get you started with the API are provided for use with Java, Python, and even for use with Ethernet-enabled Arduinos, allowing you to easily get started with cloud data connectivity from your sensors and physical devices.

A fully browser-based user interface is provided, entirely in HTML without plugins such as Flash, allowing flexible, convenient use of the browser interface across all mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. GroveStreams can even be re-branded as your “own” application provided to your commercial customers, with your own look, feel and brand identity – while all the cloud infrastructure and hosting under the bonnet is handled by GroveStreams.

GroveStreams is free for small users. Large users will only be billed for what they use (the number of transactions, the number of streams, etc). Once a user’s account exceeds the free metric amounts, they will be required to register a credit card with their account. Billing metrics are constantly gathered and can be monitored in an organisation owner’s account page. For users who aren’t organisation owners, it’s free.

Anyone who needs to collect large amounts of time-series data, monitor it, analyse it and react to this data or data from other devices quickly could benefit from connectivity to the GroveStreams service. Whether you want to monitor one data stream from a single source or many more streams from many sources, GroveStreams is likely to be useful for many different users, including utilities, sensor/device driven organisations or businesses that would benefit from near-real-time sensor data collection and analytics in the cloud. With accounts provided completely free for small-scale users, GroveStreams is also an attractive and accessible platform for electronics hobbyists, open-source enthusiasts and Arduino users looking to get started with a cloud service for data storage, analytics and visualisation for networks of Internet-of-Things sensors and devices.

And thus the possibility of harnessing the Internet of Things is made possible once again by a new platform with many possibilties. Here at the LX Group we can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

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 Axeda Machine Cloud platform is a secure and scalable cloud platform for connected products, machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things networks which is backed up by professional, commercial support and a growing library of technical content and resources.

This versatile platform enables system integrators, solution architects, and developers to quickly and easily connect, manage and innovate powerful machine-to-machine systems, connected products and IoT applications, potentially faster and at a lower cost than with internally built solutions.

Covering a wide spectrum of areas, the Axeda platform addresses the complex requirements that are often invisible but vital to overall success, providing an end-to-end M2M solution, and not just the application user interface that your end-users see. The Axeda platform enables you to connect and communicate with any wired or wireless asset, innovating with M2M and IoT connectivity for connected product solutions.

As part of the Axeda platform, their “Machine Cloud” service includes M2M and IoT connectivity services, software agents and toolkits that enable you to establish connectivity between your devices or assets and the Axeda platform while allowing you to choose the communication methods and hardware that best suit the needs of your IoT solutions. Thus you can connect to any product using any device over any communications channel including cellular networks, WiFi, satellite, or any form of Internet connectivity, for any application.

Axeda’s M2M connectivity services include multiple types of solutions, covering different classes of devices or assets that you may need to connect to. Axeda firewall-friendly agents are software agents that run on Linux or Windows and install directly on your asset devices (if equipped with these operating systems) or on a gateway computer on your network that is connected to your assets, providing user-friendly cloud service connectivity out through firewalls without difficult firewall administration.

Working with the platform is made easier by the supplied Wireless Agent Toolkits – Java or ANSI C libraries for embedding Axeda connectivity into your devices, compiled into your own software and executed on a wide variety of embedded computer hardware platforms. These different choices offer a great deal of flexibility in getting the Axeda platform operating with your existing hardware, software and networks.

The Axeda Machine Cloud supports the open MQTT protocol, which is becoming increasingly popular and important in Internet-of-Things applications. Axeda Ready gateways support MQTT networks right out of the box, and can listen to any MQTT broker, allowing for support of local MQTT-based sensor and device networks as well as connectivity between MQTT device networks and the Axeda machine cloud.

For support of other protocols, Axeda’s Device Protocol Adapters connect to many different IoT message protocols in common use today, and these device communication servers can be extended with custom “codecs” to support new protocols, translating the native communications protocol(s) of your device or network into a form that the Axeda platform can understand and process.

The Axeda Ready program broadens the device options available to consumers, allowing you to choose the right communications technology for your Internet of Things applications. Axeda Ready is a technical compatibility approval program for communications devices and modules for embedded and machine-to-machine communications, ensuring device compatibility with the Axeda platform, speeding time to market for your designs that are aimed at use with the Axeda platform, ensuring accurate and secure data communication, and creating useful expectations of technical support and compatibility when approved hardware is used with the Axeda platform.

Futhermore maintenance and control is simple with the Axeda Wireless Console, which enables users to manage their connected assets, devices and SIMs from a single machine, eliminating the need to integrate with multiple separate platforms. Using the Axeda Wireless Console allows for easier activation and deactivation of device SIMs, better management of rate plans and traffic, and real-time configuration of alerts and alarms from remote assets.

By making SIM data available to the Axeda rules engine and APIs, developers can program logic that uses SIM billing and usage data in machine-to-machine applications to configure device behaviour and adjust plans on the fly, minimising network costs whilst also keeping the communication available when it is needed.

Axeda’s advanced M2M cloud service allows you to easily get started managing connected products, building and deploying IoT and M2M applications in confidence, backed up by Axeda’s own robust, secure and scalable data centre infrastructure, with professional operations and customer support.

Their on-demand cloud service is reliable, secure and professionally supported, allowing reliable deployment of your IoT applications without the challenges and overhead of administering and implementing the technology and hosting infrastructure yourself.

Axeda provides a pay-as-you-go model that minimises risk, rapid deployment to help you realise a relatively fast return on investment, and rapid and easy implementation to reduce the difficulty of initial implementation of your system. Axeda offers much lower upfront capital investment, with an annual subscription to their service removing a need for investment in your own servers and infrastructure.

You can focus on the business side of Internet-of-Things applications, without the need to purchase, maintain and support server infrastructure yourself.

Axeda’s Internet-of-Things cloud platform promises faster time-to-value, since your solution can be deployed more rapidly on their server infrastructure, without having to first put that infrastructure in place yourself.

You can host your own applications that you build and deploy on the Axeda Platform at Axeda’s on-demand centre, simplifying the maintenance and administration of your complete M2M and IoT solutions. Axeda offers enterprise-grade security, availability, and scalability, so you can rely on their secure and scalable infrastructure built on high-quality hardware and software investments and their operational expertise, without worrying about it yourself. Ongoing administration is performed by experts in the Axeda application, networking, security, hosting, data protection, and database administration.

As you can see, the Axeda platform offers another option in the growing cloud-based IoT infrastructure market, and if this meets your needs we can work with you to bring your product ideas into reality. If you have a great prototype or idea – and need to take it to the market, our team of engineers can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

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 new Wi-Go system from Avnet is a complete development, prototyping and experimentation platform aimed primarily at wireless data acquisition, wireless sensor networks, automation and Internet-of-Things applications – based on the Freescale Freedom Development Platform for Freescale Kinetis microcontrollers.

Avnet Wi-Go offers designers a complete solution for developing real-world IoT applications by combining Freescale’s Xtrinsic sensor technology with a powerful Kinetis-L microcontroller and an embedded Wi-Fi module.

The Wi-Go system adds Wi-Fi capability to the Freedom platform and includes a built-in 800 mAh lithium-polymer battery which can provide up to days of power for portable, wireless data acquisition from the platform’s on-board suite of sensors, along with an on-board flash memory IC to facilitate data storage and provide additional storage for things such as complex webpages which may be served up from the Wi-Go board, providing a powerful and flexible wireless sensor platform at a low cost.

To keep initial cost low, the Avnet Wi-Go is a two-board set comprised of a Freescale Freedom development board mated to an Avnet Wi-Go module. No other components arerequired to get started developing your own Internet-of-Things products and devices. The Freescale Freedom development platform is a small, low-power, cost-effective evaluation and development environmenbt aimed at quick prototyping and demonstration of applications of the Kinetis microcontroller family.

The Kinetis family offers an easy-to-use mass-storage device mode flash programmer, a virtual serial port and classic programming and run-control capabilities. The Wi-Go wireless accessory module extends this platform with a powerful suite of sensors, integrated battery and USB charging system, and wireless networking to meet an increasing demand for wireless sensor systems, portable data acquisition and connected, battery-powered Internet-of-Things applications.

The Wi-Go platform’s flexible sensor suite includes Freescale’s MMA8451Q accelerometer for 3D acceleration sensing, the MAG3110 low-power digital 3D magnetometer sensor for magnetic heading sensing, the Xtrinsic MPL3115A2 barometric pressure sensor, which provides pressure, altitude and temperature information, Vishay’s TEMT6200 ambient light sensor for light level sensing, a MAX8856 and MAX8625A for the power supply subsystem, including battery monitoring and smart charging, power management and efficient buck-boost regulation to maximise the system’s battery life.

These sensors are combined with the Kinetis KL25Z128VLK4-Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, operating at up to 48 MHz with 128 kb of flash and 16 kb of SRAM along with a full-speed USB controller and support for the sophisticated and open-standard OpenSDA USB serial and debugging interface, alongside Murata’s LBWAIZZVK7 Wi-Fi radio module, which is based on the Texas Instruments CC3000 SimpleLink 802.11b/g chipset.

As the WiFi communication hardware of the Avnet Wi-Go system are based on the CC3000 chipset, it supports TI’s SmartConfig network configuration tool, allowing easy configuration and provisioning of the wireless network settings for new Wi-Go devices on the network simply by using the SmartConfig app freely provided by TI on a smartphone connected to the wireless LAN.

The Wi-Go platform is also equipped with a S25FL216K low-power, 2 megabyte serial flash memory, flexible power supply options, a capacitive touch “slider”, an RGB LED and three discrete user LEDs as input and output devices for user interaction. The Wi-Go board also provides expansion I/O pins in a form factor that accepts Arduino-compatible “shields”, making it compatible with a rich ecosystem of third-party expansion hardware.

Example code is provided to set up a filesystem on the flash memory or to communicate with the flash in binary mode, along with other working code examples and libraries for communication with each of the other sensors, peripheral devices and WiFi radio present on the board.

Reference code and examples are provided to implement full end-to-end Internet-of-Things applications with Web services such as Exosite – for example using the TI SmartConfig app to configure wireless network connectivity, using cloud services client connection code to send data up to Exosite on the web, and streaming this data over the Web to an Android application which performs fusion of different sensor data and displays its results. It’s easy to get started logging sensor measurements on a Web service, for example, or to use a Web service to remotely select the colour of the RGB LED on the Wi-Go board.

A free cloud-based compiler is provided with each development board purchased, along with a free Freescale Xtrinsic sensor fusion toolbox application and a free connection to Avnet’s Exosite cloud services for up to two of your devices. A series of several videos is also offered by Avnet, outlining the capabilities of the Wi-Go platform in order to assist designers in creating Wi-Go based wireless applications.

These videos cover topics such as Xtrinsic sensor fusion on the Wi-Go platform, cloud capabilities of Wi-Go, and Web server and network configuration for Wi-Go. Finally, the Wi-Go platform is open-source, and designers have access to all design files and source code, which is an attractive feature for engineers looking to reduce the time to market for products and systems developed for Internet-of-Things applications.

And that is always one of the main goals of IoT product development – time to market. If you have a great prototype or idea – and need to take it to the market, our team of engineers can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product. 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.

Let’s take a brief look at the FreeRTOS operating system, and the FreeRTOS+Nabto platform. It’s the market-leading, real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems that is not only open-source, high quality and well supported – but also provides strong cross-platform support across 33 different architectures, access to high-quality training and information, pre-configured example projects and a growing user community.

Furthermore FreeRTOS is available in a high-reliability TUV-approved version for demanding, safety-critical applications – providing peace of mind to commercial users, with strict configuration management to ensure high quality development of the FreeRTOS project’s code, and FreeRTOS is free to embed in commercial products without any requirement to expose your proprietary source code.

By combining the FreeRTOS real-time operating system with the patented Nabto peer-to-peer remote access communication platform for embedded systems, you can harness a simple and secure HTML5 or native application interface for your end users, along with an adaptive and flexible data-acquisition interface for data collection, central analysis and monitoring systems.

The resulting combined system brings simplicity, platform independence, inclusive cloud hosting services and entry level access to Nabto’s Internet-of-Things solution together into an interesting easy yet powerful real-time platform for use with embedded Internet-of-Things systems.

FreeRTOS+Nabto is a small piece of C code that, when integrated into an embedded networked device, allows that device to be remotely accessed and controlled through a rich web-based or native iOS or Android app-based interface or intelligent data acquisition system – consuming less than 23 Kb of flash in a typical system including both the FreeRTOS kernel and the IP stack.

Each device has a unique URL, allowing the device to be automatically located across the Internet, and the Nabto technology allows secure, authenticated and bandwidth-efficient peer-to-peer connections to be established even when the device is deployed behind a NAT firewall which removes the complexity of configuring firewall penetration for embedded Internet-of-Things devices in enterprise environments.

FreeRTOS+Nabto enabled devices can also be accessed over the local network in the absence of Internet connectivity. As FreeRTOS+Nabto is a new, simple, cross-platform and fully integrated solution for the Internet of Things, it provides a cloud infrastructure that enables IoT devices to be accessed through a rich user interface running in a web browser or a smartphone app – requiring the device itself to only supply the live sensor data and no other components of the interface, supplying this data via UDP in a lightweight way.

This means that the embedded devices themselves can be kept simple, power-efficient and lightweight – the use of cloud technologies means small FreeRTOS+Nabto devices can be given rich user interfaces without the need for any on-board filesystem or a TCP/IP stack, only relatively lightweight UDP/IP networking support.

These rich user interfaces can be accessed locally via the LAN or anywhere in the world via the Internet, from a computer, tablet or smartphone, with local device discovery and unique and resolvable URLs for each FreeRTOS+Nabto device provided over the chosen domain (LAN or Internet), solving the traditionally difficult problem of naming and uniquely identifying devices in large Internet-of-Things networks.

Using FreeRTOS+Nabto you can connect to a remote IoT device wherever that device is at the time of the connection simply by knowing the device’s unique URL, and being securely authenticated as a legitimate user, with the system handling all the networking, routing and encryption necessary to securely network your IoT devices, address and find them – across the LAN or across the Internet.

All you need to do as an application developer is compile the source code, write a single interface function, and make use of the FreeRTOS+Nabto fully managed cloud service. Instructions and tutorials are provided to make this easy for you, with a strong community of users and the availability of professional support for commercial customers.

Different web content can be served to different geographic regions, moving the burden of internationalisation from the embedded device into the cloud, allowing for even smaller code size and simpler more maintainable designs. All the network routing and protocol details are encapsulated within the FreeRTOS+Nabto product and its inclusive cloud hosting service, enabling FreeRTOS+Nabto to interface with the user’s application source code through a single C function, and enabling FreeRTOS+Nabto to be accessible to users and developers without an advanced level of existing networking expertise.

The FreeRTOS+Nabto platform includes a fully documented live online example that is running on a small real-world microcontroller and a separate project that uses the FreeRTOS Windows simulator. The Windows simulator version creates live virtual FreeRTOS+Nabto nodes on a local network to allow FreeRTOS+Nabto to be evaluated quickly and easily and without the need to purchase any specific hardware.

Although the simulator differs from FreeRTOS running on real hardware in that it does not exhibit real-time behaviour, the ability to set up a development environment, create and experiment with FreeRTOS+Nabto Internet-of-Things applications on a local network before purchasing any specific hardware is still a very useful and attractive capability.

Thanks to the open nature of FreeRTOS, it can be used in a wide range of embedded hardware and become part of your new or existing IoT products. As experts not only embedded hardware but also full idea-to-delivery of products, our consultants and engineers can work with you to meet your goals.

The first step is 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.

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

Constrained Application Protocol, or CoAP, is an application-layer networking protocol aimed primarily at application in networks of small resource-constrained embedded devices, wireless sensor networks and similar Internet-of-Things applications – helping to enable efficient networking and Internet connectivity with low overheads.

This protocol is particularly well suited to low-power wireless sensor networks with lossy networking and embedded control and automation systems, where such systems need to be supervised or controlled remotely via standard Internet networks.

CoAP is designed to easily translate to HTTP for simplified integration with the web, while also meeting specialised requirements such as multicast support, very low overhead, and simplicity. These are valuable, important features for Internet-of-Things and machine-to-machine networks which tend to be deeply embedded and have much less memory and power available than traditional Internet-connected computers and mobile devices, meaning that efficiency and low overheads are important.

Furthermore CoAP enables embedded web services for even the most constrained devices and networks, while integrating with the web architecture and HTTP. Optimised for applications such as smart energy, home and building automation, asset tracking and cellular M2M, CoAP is emerging as an increasingly popular and important, standardised and interoperable technology in the Internet-of-Things sector.

CoAP includes several HTTP-like functionalities, but they have been fundamentally redesigned for operation in resource-constrained Internet-of-Things and embedded networks. Like HTTP, CoAP identifies resources using a universal resource identifier, and allows resources to be manipulated using HTTP-style methods such as GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.

The protocol’s transaction layer can include four types of messages: confirmable, where acknowledgement is required, non-confirmable, where acknowledgement is not required, acknowledgement for a confirmable message, or reset, which indicates that a confirmable message is received but the information that would provide the context to allow it to be processed is missing.

CoAP makes use of two message types, requests and responses – using a simple binary header format that is not demanding to parse, and it is at this request/response layer where the REST-based communication occurs. This request/response model may be contrasted with other models such as the publish/subscribe model employed by other significant transport protocols in Internet-of-Things technologies, such as MQTT.

The base header may be followed by further options in an optimised Type-Length-Value format. CoAP is bound to UDP by default and optionally to datagram transport layer security or DTLS, meaning that CoAP can run on many common devices that support UDP or a UDP analogue, whilst providing the optional capability for secure CoAP, which mandates the use of DTLS as the underlying security protocol, providing the potential for good security in applications where authentication and security is an important requirement.

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s Constrained RESTful environments (CoRE) Working Group has done the majority of formal standardisation work with CoAP so far, with a set of IETF Requests for Comments soon to be released surrounding CoAP standards. The standardisation of CoAP by the IETF is in its final stages, and the protocol is soon entering into IETF Internet Standards documents that are aimed at standards-building to better enable the Internet of Things.

In order to make the protocol best suited to Internet-of-Things and and machine-to-machine applications, various new functionalities have been added. The CoRE working group has proposed low header overhead and low parsing complexity as key goals of the CoAP standard-building effort, along with support for the discovery of resources provided by known CoAP services, and mechanisms for simple subscription to a resource and resulting push notifications from that resource.

The mapping of CoAP with HTTP is defined, with RESTful protocol design, allowing proxies to be built to provide access to CoAP resources via HTTP in a uniform way without difficulty.

Access to CoAP resources via RESTful HTTP over TCP is particularly attractive for connecting embedded devices in consumer premises to the Internet, given the near universal availability of HTTP stacks for various diverse platforms.

The RESTful HTTP approach has found success in smaller-scale networks, particularly low-power and lossy wireless networks where message latencies are required to be within the order of seconds, for example for home automation and smart energy management networks.

As some examples of significant adoption of CoAP by major commercial players in the emerging Internet-of-Things industry, CoAP has already found success as a key enabling technology for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) applications for electricity utility companies deployed within Cisco Systems’ Field Area Network ecosystem.

Sensinode’s NanoService solution uses CoAP, together with their semantic web linking, resource directory and EXI technology, to provide end-to-end embedded web services for the Internet of Things.

If CoAP appeals as a protocol for your next IoT-enabled product or design revision – or you’re interested in any or all stages of the process and need a partner to help meet your goals – the first step is to discuss your needs with our team of experienced engineers that can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

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.