All posts tagged: lx

Although the Scrum agile methodology was originally formalised for software development projects, as with other agile frameworks it can be applied well to any complex, innovative project that a team works on.

Scrum is a way for teams to work together to develop a product where product development occurs in small pieces, with each piece building upon previously created pieces. Building products one small piece at a time encourages creativity and enables teams to respond to feedback and change, to build exactly what is needed using a most efficient manner.

Furthermore it’s a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex projects that provide a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation on solving what might otherwise be an insurmountable challenge.

So let’s have a look at how scrum methodology can be applied, and its potential benefits and challenges, when applied to embedded systems and hardware projects. Building complex products for customers is an inherently difficult task, even more so for projects that have a hardware component, and Scrum provides structure to allow teams to deal with that difficulty.

However, the fundamental Scrum process is quite simple and at its core it is governed by a few core roles on the project team. Product owners determine what needs to be built during a “sprint” interval of 1 to 4 weeks and the development team does the technical work to design and build what is needed during this interval, followed by demonstration of what they have built.

Based on this demonstration, the product owner determines what to build next. The Scrum master ensures this process happens as smoothly as possible and continually helps to improve the process.

A key principle of Scrum that differentiates it from traditional project management philosophies is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they need or want, and that unpredictable challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner.

As such, scrum methodology adopts an empirical approach, accepting that the project cannot be perfectly understood or defined in advance and instead the team focuses on maximising its ability to deliver small iterations of progress quickly and to respond to changing or emerging requirements as the project proceeds.

As the team proceeds through the “backlog” of tasks during a scrum project, it is accepted that changes can and will happen – the team may learn about new market opportunities to take advantage of, competitor threats that may arise, or customer feedback may change the way the product is supposed to work.

When it comes to hardware projects, the time constraints involved in fabrication of printed circuit boards, the ordering of components, hardware assembly or other external manufacturing dependencies and the commitment to a particular hardware prototype design once it has been sent for manufacturing can potentially make it much more difficult to respond to new or changing customer specifications or requirements within the fixed timeframe of a given sprint.

If these kinds of factors in ordering or manufacturing hardware devices exceed the time allocated for a sprint, these manufacturing issues can present a unique challenge when trying to apply agile methods to hardware development.

The “sprint” is the basic unit of development effort in a Scrum project, a period of typically 1 to 4 weeks in which development occurs on a set of “backlog” items that the team has committed to, restricted to a specific time duration which is fixed in advance for each sprint.

Over the course of a sprint the project team has a physical, co-located, “stand-up” meeting every day to communicate between the team and assess its work, while the scrum master keeps the team focused on its goal along the way.

For hardware projects, increasingly popular and accessible tools and technologies such as small-scale CNC milling, 3D printing, and laser cutting are becoming more important for rapid prototyping and agile hardware development, allowing components such as custom plastics or simple PCBs to be rapidly prototyped, demonstrated to the product owner and evaluated within a sprint.

A prototype iteration of a hardware system doesn’t have to physically involve hardware. Simulation and visualisation tools, such as SPICE for electronic engineering, 3D rendering of mechanical components and PCB component dimensions, and thermal modelling for predicting heat transport with a device enclosure, for example, can all play an important role in assuring the quality, interoperability, industrial design, electrical and thermal performance and the “look and feel” of all the components that come together into a new product even before a prototype is actually physically constructed.

These tools and techniques can also be valuable to demonstrate hardware design and engineering progress relatively quickly, within the finite timeframe of a sprint, if the manufacturing of physical prototype hardware will take longer.

Once again this shows that agile can be used effectively with embedded (and other) hardware development if all members of the team embrace the methodology. And that includes the engineering team here at the LX Group – who can 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.

Atmel has recently expanded its SmartConnect wireless connectivity portfolio with the announcement of a series of new, turnkey 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi system-on-chips and modules which are aimed at enabling expanded possibilities in Internet-of-Things, home or building automation and smart energy management as well as smart, connected consumer electronics applications.

The Atmel SmartConnect Wi-Fi family is a range of self-contained, low-power and pre-certified system-on-chips and modules which bring 802.11 wireless LAN connectivity – and access to the Internet – to any embedded system.

These integrated modules offer a great solution for designers seeking to integrate Wi-Fi connectivity without any existing engineering experience with 802.11, real-time operating systems, IP stack concepts nor RF electronics.

Aimed at opening the emerging “Internet of Things”, Atmel’s SmartConnect Wi-Fi portfolio is ready to be integrated in a vast array of battery-powered devices and applications requiring the integration of WLAN connectivity without compromising on cost and power consumption.

Although an active 802.11 radio is more power hungry than some other RF connectivity standards such as Bluetooth Low Energy or 802.15.4/6LoWPAN – the familiarity and existing ubiquitous infrastructure built around the 802.11 wireless LAN standard makes it an attractive choice for many applications, avoiding the need for extra hubs, gateways or cables to be installed to get your devices connected to the Internet.

Atmel’s Wi-Fi system-on-chips are optimised for applications requiring energy efficiency, such as battery-powered devices, with a wide 1.8V to 3.6V supply voltage range, a deep-sleep-mode with less than 20 micro amps of current draw and an architecture that allows for instant switching of the radio on or off or into a sleep state without startup delays.

This allows for battery-powered devices such as portable nodes in wireless sensor networks to be connected to the Internet whilst still retaining extremely good energy efficiency, staying in a sleep state most of the time, waking up several times per day for a moment to collect sensor values and send this data to a server on the Internet before going back to sleep.

Atmel’s SMART SAMW23 Wi-Fi modules are based on Atmel’s low-power Wi-Fi System-on-Chip technology, incorporating WiFi along with an ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller core – a fully integrated single-source microcontroller-plus-Wi-Fi radio solution compatible with Atmel Studio 6 and capable of supporting network-connected battery-powered network nodes with a battery lifetime up to years, on a single chip.

This turnkey system provides an integrated software solution, which incorporates application and security protocols such as TLS, an integrated TCP/IP stack and other network services along with a standard real-time operating system.

To help you accelerate your development of these kinds of Wi-Fi connected embedded sensor networks and other Internet-of-Things applications, Atmel will be making the SAMW23 Wi-Fi system-on-chip available on one of Atmel’s standard Atmel Xplained evaluation boards which will be able to plug into any other Atmel Xplained Pro microcontroller evaluation board.

Getting started with coding is helped by the SmartConnect library provided by Atmel for use with their SmartConnect range of Wi-Fi hardware – a turnkey software framework that is available for you to use in Atmel Studio 6. It removes the need to understand the Wi-Fi stack, enabling designers to focus on the functionality and user experience of their product.

The Atmel ATWINC1500/ATWILC1000 SmartConnect system-on-chip is a family of IEEE802.11b/g/n network controller and link controller targeted at Internet-of-Things applications, providing valuable solutions for add-on WiFi connectivity in existing microcontroller solutions and product designs, bringing wireless LAN connectivity to your embedded device through a serial UART or SPI interface.

The WINC1500/WILC1000 chipsets connect to any Atmel AVR or SMART microcontroller with minimal resource requirements, and in their most advanced mode of operation these chips support single-stream 1×1 802.11n connectivity providing up to 72 Mbps PHY throughput.

Both devices feature a fully-integrated RF power amplifier, LNA, RF switch and power management system and provide internal Flash memory as well as multiple peripheral interfaces including UART, SPI and I2C.

For the serious enthusiast or less-technical developers, the Arduino team in collaboration with Atmel have recently announced the launch of the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 – an Arduino shield based around the new Atmel ATWINC1500 802.11 network controller, which enables rapid prototyping of wireless, Internet-connected Internet-of-Things applications on the popular open-source Arduino development platform at a relatively low cost.

This cost-effective and secure new Arduino Wi-Fi shield is an easy-to-use extension that can seamlessly be connected to any Arduino board, enabling high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity, giving the Arduino design and developer community more opportunities to securely connect Internet-of-Things applications ranging from consumer appliances to wearable electronics, robotics, or countless other applications where wireless network connectivity is desirable.

And thanks to the open-source nature of the Arduino team’s projects, some leverage can be gained for your own products if using the same open-source licensing model. However the new Atmel wireless platform holds great promise for developers of IoT-enabled hardware. And that includes the engineering team here at the LX Group – who can 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.

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 Agile Manifesto is based around twelve principles, guiding concepts which build upon the four core values of Agile and support project teams in implementing Agile management methods, helping to lead to better project outcomes, better engineering and better customer satisfaction.

Let’s review these twelve principles of Agile project management and the relevance that they have to project management, particularly in the context of embedded computing, electronic engineering and product design projects.

The first principle is that it is the highest priority of an Agile project team to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable technology – and this remains true whether the product is software or hardware, embedded firmware, or any type of industrial design or engineering product.

Valuable engineering that is delivered to the customer early and continuously may not be the final product, but it might consist of rapid design iterations, demonstrations of certain subsystems or modules, proof-of-concept engineering, or prototypes constructed for demonstration using rapid manufacturing and rapid prototyping techniques such as 3D printing or digital logic synthesis in an FPGA.

The second of the core principles of Agile project management is that changing requirements should be welcomed, even late in development. This means that the customer should not be expected to provide a complete and concrete specification of all project requirements at the start of the project and never change or add to it.

Change should be welcomed, and Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. This principle applies equally for embedded design and hardware projects as it does for the management of software projects, however obviously there can be challenges when incorporating new requirements from the customer into a hardware project late in development.

For example, it may be difficult to incorporate new or different requirements into an existing PCB design and layout, requiring increased time and cost to design and fabricate a new PCB. In some cases, depending on size and mechanical requirements, using multiple modules and interconnected boards within a hardware system can allow for easier changes or the addition of new functionality without “wasting” existing hardware and its embodied time and money if a new iteration is required.

The use of programmable logic devices or FPGAs, or microcontrollers with their functionality reconfigurable in firmware, can also be useful in this regard – although this may increase cost or power consumption compared to a hardware system with application-specific, fixed functionality.

The third of the core principles of Agile management is to deliver working technology frequently, over a timescale of a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference towards keeping this timescale as short as possible.

Like the other principles we have discussed, this principle is also useful and applicable towards hardware projects. Although there may be insurmountable time constraints, such as lead time for components, PCB manufacturing or assembly, the rapid delivery of working iterations of hardware, even if it is just for a subsystem or a prototype that validates part of the overall system design, is a valuable goal and it is practical to achieve in most cases in a typical hardware project.

Another of the twelve principles of Agile is that working engineering that can be demonstrated, even if it is just a subsystem, a component, an experiment or prototype and not the “final” deliverable product, is the primary measure of project progress. Other metrics that might be applied to gauge project progress are of secondary value compared to the actual technology created.

Further core principles of Agile are that business people and customer representatives should work together intimately with developers and engineers throughout the project, with close contact and communication between them during project development, preferably every day, and that project teams should be built around motivated individuals on the development or engineering teams who are given the support and environment that they need to get the job done, as well as given the trust that they will get the job done without micromanagement.

Among the other core principles of Agile project management are the principles that the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation, and the belief that Agile processes promote sustainable development and a sustainable use of the human resources of the team, where the sponsors, developers, engineers and users making up a project team should be able to maintain a constant pace of work indefinitely.

The remaining principles are that continuous attention to technical excellence, good engineering and good design enhances agility, that simplicity and the art of maximising the amount of work that does not need to be done is essential, and that the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams.

Finally, one of the core principles of Agile management is that it values regular adaptation to changing circumstances. Ideally, an agile team reflects on how to become more effective and then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly at regular intervals.

These Agile principles also retain their advantages and their potential usefulness irrespective of the technical nature of the particular project that you’re managing – there is no real difference between a software project or a project working with electronic hardware or any other kind of engineering or non-engineering project when it comes to understanding the potential benefits of these Agile values.

With some thought and buy-in by all members of your team, you can use Agile methods on a wide variety of projects. And if you’re looking for a partner in yoru project development, 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.

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 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.

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

Agile project management methods aren’t new, however they can still be considered somewhat foreign to most teams developing hardware or combined embedded hardware and software products.

There are a number of both advantages and potential disadvantages that are worth considering when it comes to the role of Agile management methods in hardware projects that should be considered in the decision-making process of switching from a traditional waterfall project management method to an Agile approach for the management of your projects.

Imagine a team that focuses on how their work will be used by the customer, and who quickly incorporates feedback from other teams and test users to build something that gets better and better in noticeable and usable incremental chunks of productivity. They may work without the usual documentation and strict procedures because communication is fast and usually face-to-face, with the results being what is important.

These are some of the typical advantages associated with Agile project management techniques, along with improvements in efficiency and team productivity that come from co-location of teams, pair programming (and more generally, “pair engineering” in the context of a non-software project), regular stand-up meetings and similar interpersonal communication techniques within your project team that are an important part of many Agile methods.

Some of the other key advantages that are typically ascribed to Agile project management techniques include the reduction of traditional, formal written documentation because of the sense that reducing the requirement for this type of documentation allows creativity to increase, a reduction in the time that is typically consumed doing blind research, and the relatively rapid delivery of new iterations of hardware or software prototypes which allow improvements to be demonstrated more rapidly, broken up into smaller chunks.

Another advantage of Agile methods is that multiple cycles of iterative development, testing and feedback speed up the evolution of a quality product, as well as allowing relatively rapid education of new members of the development team, allowing skills and experience with particular tools, client industries or user stories to be learned rapidly where prior experience may be lacking.

Despite many apparently compelling advantages of Agile methods, however, some development teams and companies prefer the perceived stability and predictability of a traditional development process and a “waterfall” project model.

They feel that the traditional approach of comprehensive documentation and specific up-front contract negotiation protects them from risk and allows one team to follow the work of another in a consistent and reproducible way. When your product involves a combination of hardware and software – as is often the case in today’s world of embedded systems and connected Internet-of-Things devices, this involves special hurdles and some people feel that agile methods are not well suited, or insufficiently well developed, to handle this area well and that traditional engineering management strategies are the best when you’re working with this type of technology.

Some possible disadvantages that you may encounter when trying to incorporate agile methods into your product development include an increase in the amount of data that you need to manage, in order to keep track of rapid revisions and many different versions of prototype hardware and software, and the increased complexity of your communication and coordination within your team and between the team and the customer as the project proceeds.

Some organisations may find that they have a hard time getting over the disadvantages of changing their processes and dealing with perceived increases in risk. There are real costs associated with your transition to new, different procedures and tools, and the perception that moving away from formal up-front contract and specification processes with your clients could expose you to increased risks can be, to some extent, correct.

Another one of the challenges facing agile management of projects with both hardware and software development components is that software can normally be developed relatively rapidly, and the software development process broken down into smaller chunks or iterations relatively easily.

On the other hand, it may require three to six months or more to develop an iteration of a hardware product and to demonstrate a working component or feature. Hardware is hard, as they say, and it is harder to break up the project into small components that can be worked on in small, short sprints with a working iteration of a product or component at the end. If the software must wait for the hardware to be created prior to final testing of the integrated system, this can add delays to your testing process.

Nevertheless, don’t let these put you off considering Agile for your project development. By working with experienced partners you can exceed your goals, and 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.

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

Mango Automation is an open-source software platform aimed at machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, industrial control and SCADA networks, home and building automation and smart energy applications as well as other applications in the Internet-of-Things domain.

As a web browser-based, Ajax-enabled M2M software platform, Mango enables users to access and control Internet-of-Things networks and devices over multiple protocols simultaneously with a product that is easy to download and install across a range of different platforms.

However there is much more, Mango is a flexible, cross-platform software suite for industrial control and SCADA applications that allows you to record, log, graph, animate, alarm and report on data from sensors, equipment, PLCs, databases and webpages -providing an all-in-one data logging, control and monitoring system with a web browser based interface.

Because of Mango’s highly modular design, you can use Mango to put together the exact application that fits your needs. And as Mango is web browser based, with full support for almost all popular web browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, it’s simple to deploy and use across a broad range of different devices with different operating systems, including PCs, smartphones or tablets, as long as your device supports a compatible web browser.

With an easy to use, visual, dynamic drag-and-drop design tool for configuring “dashboards” for the visualisation of your data, Mango can bring Internet-of-Things data to life.

Your data resides where you install Mango, so you are in control of your data, with the permissions that different users have to work with different sets administered under your control, and all in-browser communications with Mango supporting Secure Socket Layer (as with all modern web browsers), meaning that when using Mango you can have confidence in the security, privacy and local control of your data.

Mango provides an interface with which diverse data sources can be created and configured while providing downstream management of user access, alerts, data logging and automation, as well as providing flexible and convenient support for event handling.

Any events that occur in Mango can be handled arbitrarily through user-defined event handlers for both system and user-defined events. Your event handlers can initiate external actions such as sending email notifications and escalations via a mail server, for example, or they can set values of data points in Mango’s database.

Mango works well with very lightweight, compact embedded computers, offering very low energy use, no noise and low cost. On an embedded Linux box with an 800 MHz CPU and 500 Mb of RAM, for example, Mango can host hundreds of data points collected from multiple data sources using multiple protocols, just using an embedded database.

When more powerful hardware is used, and MySQL is configured, Mango can support thousands or tens of thousands of data points on a single Mango instance, storing its data in an external MySQL database.

Mango supports a broad range of different connectivity and communications protocols for communication with external hardware and software services, and Mango can receive data from any device for which there is a protocol driver.

Currently supported protocols include Modbus, BACnet, OPC DA, Dallas 1-Wire, SNMP, SQL, HTTP, POP3, NMEA 0183, MBus, DNP3, OpenV, VMstat, and many other proprietary protocols developed by or for hardware vendors. As well as communicating with sensors and hardware devices such as webcams, Mango can easily communicate data, notifications and alerts with Web servers, mail servers, SQL databases and the like.

Mango also supports a “virtual” data source that can generate data for benchmarking or testing purposes, and support for more protocols is regularly being added with each new version of the software.

As Mango is entirely built around standard software technologies and tools such as SQL databases, Java, Ajax, Apache Tomcat and the Jetty webserver. Because of the adoption of standard technologies and best practices by the Mango development team and the wider open-source community which contributes patches back to Mango, the familiarity and experience with these widely used and industry-proven components helps to manage security and integration issues, making Mango more scalable, secure and reliable.

Mango is based around a core that provides the base services that the application uses and this core is written in Java, so it will run on any platform supported by Java 6 – Windows, Linux or Mac, for example, as well as many less familiar embedded environments.

The core functionality is extended to meet your application-specific needs by adding Mango Automation modules, which are simply “plugged in” to a Mango core instance by copying them into a sub-directory, and provide the specific functionality you need to create your SCADA application. Modules provide functionality such as connectivity to equipment via device “data sources”, graphical user interfaces, dashboards, language translations, themes and more.

As an open-source system, Mango offers you an almost infinite range of possibilities with a low initial investment – however there will always be the development time and related costs. But don’t let this put you off – Mango may be the ideal backbone your M2M requirements.

If this is of interest to you, or you’re looking to enter the world of the Internet-of-Things – then consult the experienced team 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.

Agile project management practices, which can be applied to the management of hardware development or other engineering projects – and not just the software development projects for which these methods were mostly originally developed, have the potential to deliver increased customer satisfaction compared to traditional project management methods such as the “waterfall” technique.

These improvements in customer satisfaction that can be achieved by Agile projects come about because of a combination of many different advantages that Agile practices can offer, particularly in the ways that Agile project techniques involve and engage the customer, the customer’s feedback, ideas and expertise throughout the product development lifecycle.

These Agile project management practices can increase the satisfaction of your customers by keeping the customers involved and actively engaged through the development cycle of their new product, making the customer feel like they are a valuable, integral part of the project team – which, of course, they are.

This enables rapid and precise feedback between the customer (or customer representatives and advocates on the team such as the “Product Owner”, who often play an important role in Agile project teams) and the development team.

Furthermore this also gives the development team an intimate contextual understanding of the customer’s requirements, specifications and ideas by keeping the customer or customer champion embedded in close contact with the development team. Finally, customer satisfaction is increased thanks to your progress and with the product; these practices can help to make the product itself fundamentally better, too.

Whilst these kinds of Agile project methodologies can work at their best when an actual customer representative is available frequently for team meetings, to communicate product requirements and business needs, if a customer representative is not available then the Product Owner, a role filled by one member from the project management team, can perform this role effectively.

The “Product Owner”, who is a core part of many Agile project teams, is an expert on the customer’s needs and product requirements, and serves as an advocate for customer and business outcomes, constantly directing the team in a direction that is focused on customer results and customer centred value, rather than considerations such as what is technically easiest, or technically most elegant, which otherwise may be given greater emphasis by the engineering or development teams.

Agile project management practices can deliver improved customer satisfaction and customer-focused outcomes by keeping the product backlog updated regularly and prioritised, allowing the team to quickly and efficiently respond to urgent issues, to newly established product requirements, or other changes that need to be addressed, without wasting time with less organised project management or implementing new features or changes that are less urgent and less important to the customer and business outcomes. Agile practices can also deliver improvements in customer satisfaction and product outcomes by demonstrating working functionality to customers in every sprint review.

This rapid iteration of new prototypes and repeated demonstration of working software or hardware technology gives the customer and/or the Product Owner a very clear understanding of the project progress that is being made, inspires new ideas for features or changes either in the product itself or in the ways that the product may be used or marketed, and allows for rapid discussion of changes, improvements or design specifications that are desired between the customer and the project team.

Another way that Agile management practices can result in a project with relatively strong satisfaction for the customer is by delivering products to market quicker and more often with every release.

Finally, another factor that can allow Agile project management techniques to deliver greater customer satisfaction from your project is by possessing the potential for better results with self-funded or crowd funded projects; allowing the scope, scale or schedule of a project to rapidly be changed even in the middle of the project development cycle.

This means, for example, that Agile projects can adapt to be most compatible with a changing or insecure funding environment, a self-funded environment with very limited access to cash flow and resources, a crowd funding project that has delivered funding less than what has been hoped, or a crowd funding project that has turned out much more successful than anticipated, with plenty of upfront funding available, but with demands for manufacturing scale and product fulfilment that are much larger than originally anticipated.

These and other Agile hardware development techniques can be harnessed by any organisation. However if this is new to you, or it seems like a complex path – then consult the experienced team 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 PubNub Data Stream Network enables developers to rapidly build real-time apps that scale globally, without worrying about infrastructure. PubNub enables you to easily build and scale real-time apps and connected data-stream services for home automation, Internet-of-Things applications, connected devices and just about anything else with APIs and support across a large range of different platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

Using PubNub’s extensive, friendly documentation, quick-start guides, APIs and building blocks, you can easily get started building your own real-time, connected apps very quickly – building an entire simple app in minutes, without worrying about cloud connectivity or infrastructure.

The aim of the PubNub system is to provide a real-time infrastructure and framework for developers to build real-time apps as easily as building a web page. The PubNub Realtime Network provides global cloud infrastructure and key building blocks for real-time interactivity, allowing developers to spend their time and effort on what they do best, creating brilliant real-time apps, without worrying about infrastructure challenges, but also providing users with the real-time information updates, real-time connectivity, interaction, communication and collaboration experiences that they expect from today’s apps and web services.

Key “building blocks” are provided to implement basic functions such as analytics, mobile support, security, storage, presence detection and push notifications in your app, allowing you to rapidly “plug together” cloud-connected application prototypes.

The system provides support and SDKs for over 50 languages and development platforms, including iOS, Android, JavaScript, .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, and many others, and supports a vast array of platforms and frameworks with easy-to-use APIs for mobile, browser, desktop, server, or embedded Internet-of-Things applications.

Furthermore, PubNub Presence allows real-time monitoring of devices and their presence in Internet-of-Things applications, and PubNub offers many other features that are particularly valuable in IoT applications. However, the capability that PubNub provides, allowing you to add real-time communications to your apps without worrying about infrastructure, and to stream, store, sync, secure and manage your data on all devices, everywhere, is valuable for applications in all kinds of mobile, desktop or browser-based environments – not only in Internet-of-Things applications.

As well as support for these languages and operating systems, PubNub provides support, documentation and SDKs to enable connectivity with many popular hardware platforms for embedded and IoT applications, such as Electric Imp, mBed and Raspberry Pi. This allows for low-cost prototype and final product development thanks to PubNub working with these open-source hardware platforms.

You can try PubNub free of charge, using a free sandbox account for demonstration, hacking or experimentation. A sandbox-level account allows you to build PubNub-based applications with up to 20 daily active devices, which should be more than enough to get you up and running. If you need support, the free sandbox-tier account also provides access to the PubNub community forums, and a “best effort” service-level agreement.

Of course there are also a broad range of paid account tiers available, allowing you to support the number of devices and amount of bandwidth that your application requires at an economic rate that can scale up and grow with your business.

Message payloads up to 32 kilobytes in size can be sent through PubNub, with a small fee per message applicable to paid accounts, charged on a varying scale depending on the message payload size you send and whether or not SSL encryption is required for your message traffic.

The PubNub Developer Portal gives you easy access to all of your usage metrics, and these metrics are updated at least once per day, allowing you to always get an up-to-date snapshot of your historical message traffic and usage charges.

PubNub’s global cloud infrastructure allows you to build and deploy real-time apps with a very robust level of scalability, reliability, performance and service guarantees. PubNub streams more than three million messages a second to 150 million devices per month, connecting every PubNub-enabled device and platform in the world with a latency of less than 250 milliseconds.

With replication across 14 data centres around the world, PubNub provides a very high level of service reliability, and building and deploying your real-time apps via PubNub’s global infrastructure provides your applications and services with that same level of reliability even when you’re scaling up to hundreds of thousands of concurrently connected clients.

Data streamed through the PubNub real-time network is instantly replicated to PubNub’s data centres around the globe to minimise latency for the end user, and multiple levels of redundancy and failover ensure that your PubNub-based real-time app solutions always work essentially anywhere with very low latency, even with millions of users.

PubNub allows you to send messages between mobile devices instantly, and allows you to send and listen to events within your app by using simple publish and subscribe API calls. You can subscribe to a channel with a simple API call, and once subscribed to a channel, simply use the Publish API, specify the channel name and the message you’d like to send in order to publish a message to a channel.

The fact that PubNub is built around a Publish/Subscribe model for real-time messaging and signalling makes PubNub ideally suited to collecting, collating and distributing information from Internet-of-Things networks, an application area where protocols such as MQTT that are also based around a publish/subscribe messaging model are increasingly popular.

Once again, all of this means there exists another option, another choice, another system to get your Internet-of-Things ideas from your notebook to reality. And doing just that with any system may seem like an impossible task.

However with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the Arrayent 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.

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

There are many different agile development methods and process frameworks, with Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and Dynamic Systems Development Method being some of the best known. Although there are many different agile process frameworks and methods, most are fundamentally similar in that they promote teamwork, collaboration and process adaptability throughout the whole life cycle of a development project.

The various agile methodologies share much of the same underlying philosophy as well as many of the same characteristics and practices. From an implementation standpoint, however, each has its own combination of practices and terminology. Most agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning, without directly involving long-term planning.

At the end of teach iteration in the agile process, a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This minimises overall risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Iterations might not add enough functionality to warrant a market release, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration.

Multiple iterations might be required to release a product or new features. No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team contains a customer representative, for example the “Product Owner” in the Scrum method. This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a commitment to be available for developers to answer mid-iteration questions.

At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review the project’s progress and re-evaluate project priorities with a view to optimising the project’s return on investment and ensuring alignment with customer needs and business goals.

Extreme Programming, which has emerged as one of the most popular but sometimes controversial agile methodologies, is a disciplined approach to delivering high-quality software quickly and continuously. It promotes high customer involvement, rapid feedback loops, continuous testing, continuous planning, and close teamwork to deliver working software at very frequent intervals, typically every one to three weeks.

The original model of Extreme Programming (XP) is based on four simple values of simplicity, communication, feedback and courage, backed up by various supporting practices such as pair programming, test-driven development, continuous integration and collective code ownership.

In an XP project, the customer or customer advocate works very closely with the development team to define and prioritise granular units of functionality referred to as “user stories”. The development team estimates, plans, and delivers the highest priority user stories in the form of working, tested software on an iteration-by-iteration basis.

Scrum is another popular agile project management framework; a lightweight framework with broad applicability for managing and controlling iterative and incremental projects of all kinds. Scrum has achieved increasing popularity in the agile software development community due to its simplicity, proven productivity, and ability to act as a wrapper for various engineering practices promoted by other agile methodologies.

Using the Scrum methodology, the product owner works closely with the team to identify and prioritise system functionality in form of a “product backlog”. The product backlog consists of features, bug fixes, non-functional requirements and anything else that needs to be done in order to successfully deliver a working software system.

With priorities driven by the product owner – cross-functional teams estimate and sign-up to deliver “potentially shippable increments” of software during successive “sprints” typically lasting 30 days. Once the product backlog for any given sprint is committed, no additional functionality can be added to the sprint except by the development team.

Kanban is another agile method used by organisations to manage the creation of products with an emphasis on continual delivery while not overburdening the development team. Like Scrum, Kanban is a process designed to help teams work together more effectively.

It is based on the three basic principles of visualisation of the work to be done on a given day using large noticeboards, walls or “information radiators”, since seeing all the items in the context of each other can be very informative, limiting of the amount of work in progress at any given time, which helps to balance the flow-based approach so that teams don’t start too much work or commit too much work at once, and the enhancement of efficient workflow, where the next highest-priority task from the backlog is underway quickly once a previous task is completed.

The Dynamic Systems Delivery Method, or DSDM, is another important agile method, which grew out of the need to provide an industry standard project delivery framework for what used to be referred to as Rapid Application Development or RAD.

While RAD was very popular in the early 1990s, the RAD approach to software delivery evolved in a fairly unstructured manner. As a result, the DSDM Consortium was created and convened with the goal of devising and promoting a common industry framework for rapid software delivery, and since then the DSDM methodology has evolved and matured to provide a comprehensive foundation for planning, managing, executing, and scaling agile process and iterative software development projects.

DSDM specifically calls out “fitness for business purpose” as the primary criteria for delivery and acceptance of a system, focussing on the useful 80% of the system that can be deployed in 20% of the time. Requirements are baselined at a high level early in the project. Rework is built into the process, and all development changes must be reversible. Requirements are planned and delivered in short, fixed-length time-boxes, also referred to as iterations, and requirements for DSDM projects are prioritised into “must have”, “should have”, “could have” and “won’t have” categories.

All critical work must be completed in a DSDM project, but it is also important that not every requirement in a project or time-box is considered critical. Within each time-box, less critical items are included so that, if necessary, they can be removed to keep from impacting higher priority requirements on the schedule. The DSDM project framework is independent of, and can be implemented in conjunction with, other iterative agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming.

Agile hardware development may seem complex, or quite foreign – however the methods used can decrease the period of time from idea to final product launch – with the right partners. 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.

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 success or failure of new Internet-of-Things products is predicated on many factors, one of those being autonomy for portable devices – that is, how long the battery will last between charges. The less power your devices uses, the more attractive it will be to the end user and customer. And to help with this goal in mind, a new standard has emerged.

The International Electrotechnical Commission has recently ratified the new ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 standard, specifying a Wireless Short-Packet (WSP) 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.

Devices in low-power wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications that utilise energy harvesting technology can draw energy from their surroundings – for example from vibration, light or heat sources. Energy harvesting enables the use of electronic control and automation systems that work independently of an external power supply, without maintenance and without ongoing energy costs for the nodes in the sensor network.

In some environments where harvesting of small amounts of energy from ambient sources is practical, this technology offers energy savings and fast and easy installation, without the need for power cables for example, along with reductions in ongoing maintenance requirements for battery-powered devices.

International standardisation will accelerate the development and implementation of energy-optimised wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks, with the potential to also open up new markets and areas of application for wireless sensor and IoT solutions. In addition to the existing established markets for home and building automation and energy efficiency technology, further application sectors such as the “smart home”, “smart grid” and solutions in industry, logistics and transport are likely to continue to emerge into the future, with a strong foundation of interoperability, standardisation and openness provided by this novel but field-proven standard.

However, this new IEC standard specifies the architecture and lower layer protocols – the physical layer, data link and networking layer. The higher layers in the OSI network model are not specified in this standard and other standards, either open standards or vendor-specific proprietary protocols, will be used to implement the higher layers of the network.

EnOcean, which develops energy harvesting wireless technology, is a pioneer in this field, and the company has been producing and marketing maintenance-free wireless sensor solutions for use in building and industrial automation for more than ten years, with EnOcean-based products currently installed in over 250,000 buildings around the world.

EnOcean’s wireless technology is already a firmly established technology for smart buildings, energy efficiency and automation applications. The EnOcean Alliance, a cooperative industry alliance established by EnOcean, sees the ratification of this new IEC standard as one of the key prerequisites for expanding the already highly successful, fast-growing ecosystem of EnOcean-enabled products and RF communication modules from EnOcean and other vendors.

Members of the EnOcean Alliance have already introduced more than 1200 interoperable EnOcean-based products, all of which comply with the new standard. Developers and manufacturers can therefore benefit from the EnOcean Alliance’s extensive practical experience, huge product range and installed base of products deployed by customers in the field along with many years of user education and familiarisation.

The EnOcean Alliance draws up the specifications of standardised applications and device profiles based on the IEC standard, with these “EnOcean Equipment Profiles” ensuring the interoperability of products from different vendors. These standardised profiles are optimised for ultra-low energy consumption, making them a useful, tried and tested complement to the new IEC wireless sensor networking standard and allowing smart, energy-efficient automation solutions to easily be realised that are non-proprietary and industry-neutral.

EnOcean’s technology pushes wireless sensor network technology and energy efficiency to the limits, with EnOcean’s range of self-powered wireless switches, sensors, controls and other modules combining small-scale energy-harvesting power supplies with ultra-low-power electronics and reliable wireless communications.

This enables developers to create self-powered wireless sensor solutions that are valuable for efficiently managing building, smart energy management and industrial applications. Together with the EnOcean Equipment Profiles drawn up by the EnOcean Alliance, this international standard lays the foundation for fully interoperable, open, self-powered wireless technology with a level of industry-wide standardisation comparable to today’s widely accepted protocols such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

EnOcean’s technology allows fast development and marketing of new wireless solutions in building services, industry and other sectors, and standardised sensor profiles provide for interoperability of the resulting products. Devices from different manufacturers can then communicate and cooperate with other devices on the network.

Interoperability of different end-products based on EnOcean technology is an important success factor for the establishment of self-powered IoT and WSN technology in the market, and this is the reason the EnOcean Alliance pursues standardisation of communication profiles, ensuring that sensors from one manufacturer can communicate with receiver gateways of another, for example.

Software provided by the EnOcean Alliance also allows modular and versatile, user-friendly integration of these systems into end-user applications. End users thus have the entire product portfolio enabled by EnOcean and EnOcean’s self-powered energy-harvesting wireless sensor network technology at their disposal.

This allows vendors to focus on their product branding, services, support and installation, along with providing Internet services, mobile apps and other software products whilst using existing hardware and core technology – along with developing and offering hardware products to support their own specialised market niche, going beyond the existing portfolio of EnOcean-enabled products if this is desired.

And as a leading developer of IoT-enabled products, our team at the LX Group is ready to work together as your design partner to help reduce the power consumption of your new or existing product with the EnOcean standard or other options we can introduce.

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.