All posts tagged: lx

With more and more embedded computing capability, networking and Internet connectivity inside everyday systems such as household appliances, security systems, home heating and lighting systems and even cars, information security has become a potentially important consideration in devices where it wouldn’t previously be considered important – potential security threats may be lurking in embedded systems in a growing number of everyday devices.

Nowadays it isn’t just familiar personal computers that are connected to the Internet – embedded computers are more ubiquitous and are also increasingly connected, and with that connectivity and computational power comes new security threats hiding in new places.

Internet-of-Things networks, smart home automation and persuasive connectivity and embedded computing bring with them exciting new opportunities – a connected home can allow you to log in to your home network before you leave work in the evening to turn on your central heating and your oven, or allow you to log in to your home security system from your smart phone in response to an alarm notification, check your security cameras and reset your alarm if there isn’t a problem.

Unfortunately, these new opportunities do potentially bring with them a new set of security threats. Whilst most consumers are now aware that their personal computers and smart phones are potentially vulnerable to malicious software or network attack, few are aware of the potential threat to other electronic devices.

The Internet of Things may be in its infancy, but threats already exist. For example, computer worms are known to exist that are designed to target embedded devices such as cable and DSL modems and other low-power embedded devices based on architectures such as ARM and MIPS – platforms that are associated not with personal computers, but with the Internet of Things and embedded devices such as modems, routers, industrial control systems and set-top boxes.

Malware exists that adds infected modems and routers to botnets that can be used to support attacks, such as distributed denial of service attacks, on other networks and systems.

What is particularly worrisome about these kinds of threat is that in many instances, the consumer may have no idea that these types of embedded computers are vulnerable to this kind of malicious attack. Devices such as modems or routers may “hide in plain sight” containing malware, and spread it back to personal computers on the same local network.

Once these PCs have been disinfected – or being “trusted” to remain online all the time, directly connected to the Internet in many cases, without being disconnected or decoupled from the Internet as other computers may be to prevent malicious attack or infection in a security-conscious environment.

Many users may think about hardware upgrades to devices such as network routers rarely, if ever, and they may never bother with firmware upgrades and patches – or even with ever changing passwords and login details for configuration of these devices away from their default settings.

In one prominent incident, Trendnet, an organisation that markets Internet-enabled security cameras and baby monitors, shipped some of their cameras with faulty software that left them open to online viewing, and in some cases listening, by anyone on the Internet who was able to discover a camera’s IP address.

The private camera feeds of hundreds of consumers were made public on the Internet. When this vulnerability became public, people published links to the live feeds of hundreds of the cameras, displaying children sleeping and people going about their daily lives. But these devices were not infected with any malware – they were simply designed and sold with negligible security measures in place, relying only on “security through obscurity” and allowing anyone to simply access them if they knew how.

Within the last few years, we have seen a huge range of new Internet-connected and networked embedded devices emerge, from household thermostats to light bulbs to TVs to cars. Although the Internet of Things is still immature, the number of Internet-enabled devices is beginning to explode. According to Cisco Systems, there are more than 10 billion connected devices on the planet – more devices than there are people – and they predict that the world will reach a population of 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

This huge population of connected devices obviously brings with it an increased potential for security vulnerabilities, and an increased need for security awareness, both by consumers and by device manufacturers. Consumers should be aware that just because an electronic device doesn’t possess a display or a keyboard, that doesn’t mean it is not potentially vulnerable to attack. All devices that are connected to the Internet – via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and perhaps even indirectly – via Bluetooth or 802.15.4 wireless networks, looking into the future – need to be secured.

Consumers should pay attention to the security settings on any device they purchase, and disable capabilities such as remote access if they aren’t needed. Default passwords should be changed to unique, strong passwords that don’t use common, easily guessable numbers or dictionary words.

Furthermore end users should also regularly check manufacturer’s websites to see if there are any updates to software for their devices, since manufacturers will often patch security vulnerabilities with software updates if they are identified. And since network routers and modems are essentially the gateway between the Internet and other devices on the network, keeping these up-to-date and secure is very important.

However almost all security threats and possible incidents can be neutralised before the product reaches the end user. By designing appropriate levels of security into products – including various fail-safes such as mandatory passwords, firmware updates and better documentation and user education, a safer and more reliable IoT can be possible.

If you have a new product idea or an existing version that needs updating, we can take care of all facets of design and prodiucting – including the right security and user-interface to negate as much risk as possible.

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 Internet-of-things market is growing exponentially – and to some observers it may seem to be an unchecked industry with regards to standards and compatibility. However it isn’t too late to define workable standards – and just that is being done with the International Telecommunications Union’s Internet-of-Things Global Standards Initiative.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the International Telecommunications Union is a specialised agency of the United Nations that is responsible for issues that concern information and communication technologies.

This group coordinates the shared global use of the radio spectrum, promotes international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, works to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world, and assists in the development and coordination of worldwide technical standards – ITU’s standards-making efforts are its best known and oldest activity.

The ITU’s Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative (IoT GSI) is an initiative of the ITU’s standardisation group that promotes a unified approach for the development of technical standards and recommendations to enable the best possible standardisation and interoperability of the Internet of Things on a global scale.

This international initiative of standardisation has the potential to benefit everybody, from the developers and vendors of Internet-of-Things products and solutions through to consumers. Recommendations developed by the IoT GSI are developed in collaboration with other standards developing organisations – allowing developers, vendors and providers working in the emerging Internet-of-Things industry worldwide to offer a wide range of Internet-of-Things technologies in a standardised and interoperable way. The IoT-GSI also aims to act as an umbrella for further development of IoT standards worldwide.

The purpose of IoT-GSI is to provide a visible single location for information on and development of IoT standards, these being the detailed standards necessary for IoT deployment and to give service providers the means to offer the wide range of services expected from the IoT with a high degree of global standardisation.

By building on the work of other ITU standardisation group efforts in other areas such as network aspects of identification, ubiquitous sensor networks and machine-to-machine communications – the ITU can hopefully bring together different IoT-related standardisation groups both within the ITU and in the wider industry to develop detailed standards for IoT deployment.

From the global perspective of technical standardisation, the IoT can be viewed as a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting physical and virtual things based on new, and existing, interoperable information and communication technologies. ITU sees enormous potential in the Internet of Things, and hence enormous value and importance in these standardisation efforts, harmonising different approaches to the architecture of the IoT worldwide.

The ITU sees the IoT GSI as important because the deep changes to the fundamental approaches being taken to the provision of situation-aware telecommunication services from network-connected things, and the associated breadth of topics that need to be addressed, are well beyond what could be covered within any particular study group following routine standards development processes.
Furthermore the GSI also provides essential external visibility for the ITU standardisation group’s work, and is a clear and obvious place to go for information on the sector’s work in this particular area. Indeed, it serves as a banner under which to unify all the IoT-relevant activities being carried out within the ITU standardisation group.

Once finished, the IoT GSI aims to have developed a consistent definition of what the Internet of Things actually is, to provide a common working platform bringing together different standards-making, industry and academic representatives, and to develop consistent standards for IoT deployments – taking into account the work already done in other standards development organisations, and recognising that global coordination is the key to widespread success of the IoT.

To meet these objectives, the ITU Joint Coordination Activity on the Internet of Things (JCA IoT) was formed in 2006, bringing together representatives from numerous standards developing organisations, including industry forums and consortia, working in IoT-related areas.

The Joint Coordination Activity provides a platform to exchange IoT information and discuss coordination matters, avoiding overlap and duplicated effort. One of the activities of the JCA is to maintain the ITU’s IoT Standards Roadmap that includes standards from the worldwide ecosystem of standards development organisations that are either approved already or presently under development.

ITU’s IoT-GSI acts as an umbrella for the various standardisation efforts worldwide. Founded on the principle of international cooperation between governments and the private sector, ITU represents a unique global forum through which governments and industry can work towards consensus on a wide range of issues affecting the future direction of this increasingly important industry.

The technology community has highlighted a need to focus standards work in one place, distributing expert resources efficiently and avoiding the emergence of competitive approaches and the GSI responds to this, promoting a unified approach for the development of technical standards and recommendations in order to best enable the IoT efficiently and consistently on a global scale.

Recommendations developed under the IoT-GSI by the various ITU standardisation groups in collaboration with other standards developing organisations will enable technology and service providers worldwide to offer the wide range of services and products that are expected to emerge from the Internet-of-Things industry in the most interoperable and consistent way.

Although doing so may be tempting from an economical perspective, ignoring standards in your IoT-enabled product design could cost you more in the long term, by losing interoperability with other systems – or even scaring off potential customers. Therefore it’s important to be aware of the options in the market and how they can benefit your situation.

Here at the LX Group we have experience in developing IoT systems using various platforms, and can help with any or all stages of product design – to bring your ideas to life.

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

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

Wireless inductive charging, where electrical energy is transferred from a power supply to a portable electronic device without the need to plug in a physical wired connection, offers many potential advantages for both the consumer and industrial electronics industry, for such things as portable and wearable battery-powered devices and portable Internet-of-Things-enabled items. Let’s take a brief look at the current state of inductive charging technology, and its potential prospects for the future.

Wireless inductive charging typically uses an induction coil to create an alternating electromagnetic field from within a charging base station along with a second coil in a portable electronic device that takes power from the electromagnetic field and converts it back into electrical current, which is generally used to charge a battery in the device.

Typically, these systems consist of a flat transmitter coil and a flat receiver coil that are coupled by mutual inductance to form a flat transformer – with the flat coils hidden away within the small space inside the charging surface and portable device, along with appropriate electronics to drive the transmission coil with an alternating current at an appropriately high frequency and to rectify and regulate the received power on the receiver side and to negotiate and control the power transmission.

Wireless charging systems have many potential advantages, along with some potential disadvantages. Wireless power systems for portable devices are convenient to use, requiring a device such as a smartphone to simply be put onto a charging pad to charge – it can easily be picked up and used when desired without unplugging cables. Wireless power systems are also physically robust, without wear and tear on connectors and sockets that are otherwise plugged and unplugged frequently, with the possibility of wear or breakage.

Without mechanical connectors, wireless power systems are also resilient against environmental factors such as dirt or debris in the connector, corrosion, exposure to water or other contamination from the environment.

Wireless power systems are particularly attractive in the field of implanted medical electronics, allowing power transfer to devices such as pacemakers without surgical removal and replacement of batteries, or connectivity through ports in the skin, both of which carry some risks such as the possibility of infection.

However, wireless charging does mean extra electronics, and some added cost and complexity. There is also a decrease in efficiency, with increased charger power consumption and an increase in heat dissipation in the charger and the portable device.

The amount of power that can practically be transferred is also limited, and charge times for portable devices can be increased. One test of the Qi wireless charging system showed that charging a Google Nexus 7 took nearly three times as long as using a conventional power supply.

There are several wireless charging standards that are being developed or already on the market, including the Qi wireless charging standard which is one of the dominant offerings at the present time. The Qi inductive charging system can supply up to 5 watts of power (equivalent to a conventional 5V 1A smartphone charger), operating at a frequency between 110 and 205 kHz in low-power mode and 80 to 300 kHz in medium-power mode.

The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) standard is a little newer than the Qi standard, and employs a higher frequency of 6.78 MHz for power transfer, along with 2.4 GHz for negotiation and control signals. The A4WP wireless power standard also employs resonant energy transfer techniques to maximise efficiency of power transfer.

Wireless power technology has now come into the mainstream with many companies seeking to adopt the technology to provide a competitive edge to their products in the marketplace. This is mainly being driven by the smartphone industry, but as the technology becomes more widespread it is likely to see wider uptake into all kinds of other portable electronics including battery-powered wireless sensor network nodes and other Internet-of-Things technologies, to improve convenience and ease of maintenance compared to conventional battery replacement or recharging.

A few examples of smartphones already on the market that support inductive charging technology include the Lumia smartphone from Nokia, the Nexus 4 from LG Electronics, and the Droid DNA. Oral-B rechargeable toothbrushes have used inductive charging since the early 1990s.

The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) is the largest technology alliance in the wireless charging industry. Established in late 2008, WPC has nearly 150 member companies including major mobile device and semiconductor companies. The consortium introduced the Qi inductive power standard in late 2010, and this standard has developed a relatively strong foothold in the inductive charging sector.

Since Qi was introduced, more than 30 companies have shipped mobile phones using its embedded wireless charging capabilities. Those phones are designed to power up on compatible charging mats and cradles, alarm clocks and music players, and the inside surfaces of some new car models. Toyota announced in December that the 2013 Toyota Avalon Limited (in foreign markets) will be the first car to offer wireless charging with a Qi-powered console included under the dashboard.

From a competitive standpoint, WPC is up against two other notable organisations: the Alliance for Wireless Power, which includes early industry evangelist Powermat, along with Samsung, Qualcomm and others; and the Power Matters Alliance, which is supported by Powermat as well as Google, AT&T, and other significant industry players.

For now, the WPC leads the way, and its open platform theoretically offers the easiest path for companies planning new product development that supports wireless charging options. The next few years will show just how well WPC can deliver on new commercial products and the promise of wireless charging for the future.

Qi inductive technology is already increasingly widespread in the market, built into products such as the Samsung Galaxy S4, Nokia Lumia 920, and Google Nexus phones and tablets. However, greater consolidation of standards is likely to be needed for inductive charging to develop widespread industry and consumer adoption.

Multiple different inductive charging pads required for multiple devices are not attractive to consumers, and are unlikely to be cost effective. Adoption of a unified, open, industry-wide standard for inductive charging of portable electronics would solve this problem – however, a consistent, industry-wide open charging standard adopted by all major industry players including Apple can’t even be agreed to in the context of conventional plug-in charging interfaces, so it should not be taken for granted that such a universally accepted consolidated standard will emerge in the inductive charging sector.

However for bespoke products or working with existing technology, wireless charging can be integrated for the advantage of your business and customers. Here at the LX Group our team of engineers can help with any or all stages of product design to bring your ideas to life.

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

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

Near-field communication, or NFC, is a set of standards for smart phones and other devices to establish radio communication with other devices in close proximity, extending the capability of traditional RFID into a range of different devices with powerful, programmable communications capabilities in addition to more traditional zero-power passive tags.

Some examples of applications for NFC include fast, convenient payment transactions, data exchange, and simple, convenient bootstrap set up of more complex communications such as Wi-Fi. NFC builds upon the established technology of traditional radio-frequency identification (RFID) by enabling two-way communication between endpoints, whereas earlier systems such as RFID smart cards only provide data exchange in one direction.

Although a new technology to most customers, NFC is slowly making inroads to the consumer market – and especially through Android devices. For example – a relatively new feature in the Android operating system, “Android Beam”, introduced with Android 4.0+ running on suitable NFC-equipped hardware, employs NFC in combination with Bluetooth and/or WiFi for easy, convenient exchange of contacts, files, photos or other content between devices such as smart phones that are physically in close proximity without the inconvenience of addressing or network configuration.

Beam combines the convenience of NFC with the relatively high bandwidth of Bluetooth or WiFi connectivity, using NFC to enable Bluetooth on both devices, instantly pair them, communicate the required data, and then automatically disable Bluetooth on both devices. This has been extended further by some manufacturers, for example Samsung.

With their “S Beam” extension of Android Beam, first introduced on their Galaxy S3 smartphone, the system uses NFC to communicate the networking configuration to transparently establish a Wi-Fi Direct connection between the two devices for data transfer. This results in fast transmission speeds between S-Beam equipped devices whilst maintaining a convenient user experience.

Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry and Sony have also used NFC technology for convenient single-tap device pairing between NFC-enabled devices and Bluetooth wireless peripherals such as headsets, media players and speakers.

NFC-enabled devices can be used in contact-less payment systems; replacing, supplementing or consolidating the existing use of NFC in credit and bank cards, public transport ticketing and parking payment systems. As an example of a payment system based around NFC mobile devices, Google Wallet allows consumers to store credit card and loyalty card information in a virtual wallet and access it using their NFC-equipped smartphone or device at terminals that support Mastercard PayPass transactions. Furthermore, NFC technology has also been used by the city of San Francisco for mobile payment of parking meter fees, also providing automated phone reminders of the allowed time remaining.

With the release of Android 4.4, Google introduced a new platform supporting secure NFC-based transactions through Host Card Emulation, or HCE, for payments, retail loyalty programs, access control cards, public transport ticketing and other NFC-based services. With HCE, any app on an Android 4.4+ device can emulate a NFC smart card, allowing users to simply tap their smartphone to make a retail payment, public transport fare validation, or building access authentication using only a single phone instead of a wallet full of many different NFC cards – at least in theory.

However, the use of NFC technology in this fashion is dependent on support from banks and businesses, and an understanding by both companies and consumers that this technology can be deployed securely and reliably. This potential for NFC-enabled devices to act as unified, multi-function electronic identity documents and keycards is one key application area for NFC that is actively being promoted by the NFC Forum.

Smart-phones equipped with NFC can be paired with NFC tags or stickers which can be programmed via the phone to automate various tasks. These programmable tags can provide a fast, convenient change of phone settings when tapped, for example, or allow a text message to be automatically stored and sent when the tag is activated, automatically open a particular website, register attendance at an event or any number of other commands or software applications to be launched on the device.

Customers could use their smart phones to “write” data to NFC-tagged products in a store for example, allowing prospective purchasers to register interest in products, leave comments and reviews or provide their contact information for later followup by the merchant.

Similarly, visitors to museums and exhibits can use NFC enabled phones to tag exhibits with keywords, share their experience via social media, rate individual exhibits and create a personalised poster incorporating their favourite experiences.

With almost 100 million NFC-equipped smart phones estimated to be shipped just over the next year and more than a billion units predicted over the next four years, applications and solutions enabled by NFC smart phones will become more and more commonplace as hardware support becomes ubiquitous.

Similarly, NFC tags themselves are expected to become lower and lower in cost as they are manufactured in ever greater volumes and deployed extensively through products, buildings and appliances. Once NFC tags are ubiquitous throughout homes and buildings, they have a byproduct effect of providing awareness of where the phone is located.

A smart phone may automatically configure its ringer and network settings into “work mode”, “home mode” or “car mode” based on this awareness of its environment, for example, potentially launching particular applications and communicating with other networked devices and appliances when entering each new environment.

Although NFC technology may sound out of reach, nothing could be further from the truth. For example, ST Microelectronics is introducing the M24SR Discovery Kit – for developers interested in using its M24SR dynamic NFC tags for Internet of Things applications. According to ST, the kit contains everything engineers need to start adding NFC connectivity to any kind of electronic device or appliance, from fitness watches and loudspeakers to washing machines and water meters.

And as NFC tags are inexpensive, compact, and free of any power supply requirements in most cases, they provide a very easy, low-cost way to add wireless, distributed programmable intelligence throughout homes and buildings and the built environment. In conjunction with smartphones and portable devices that support NFC, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, 3G/4G, WiFi and the like, NFC tags are indirectly connected to large amounts of storage and processing power, user interfaces, the Internet, cloud services and Internet-of-Things networks.

Indirectly, NFC tags have all the same access to computational power and network connectivity that other embedded devices do, but without power requirements, without wires, and in an extremely low cost fashion suitable for ubiquitous deployment in all kinds of environments and products where other embedded computing solutions would not be economically viable – this places NFC solutions in a unique position in the Internet of Things.

Although NFC may seem prevalent in existing consumer devices, you can also add the technology to new and existing products to enhance and simplify end-user and customer experiences. This is where the LX Group can partner with you to develop any or all stages and bring your ideas to life.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free andconfidential 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.

Although not the loudest player in the Internet-of-Things market, Microsoft is increasingly pitching its Windows Embedded operating system product family as a central hub of operating system choices for the connected devices, services and data making up the Internet of Things.

Let’s take a brief look at the Windows Embedded product family and the role it can play in embedded computing and Internet-of-Things applications. Not to be outdone by Java, Linux, or other options in the market, Microsoft is staking its own claim in the Internet-of-Things and connected-device operating system space, pitching the Windows Embedded family of operating systems at applications such as vending machines, robotic controls and industrial automation, point-of-sale terminals and registers, and rugged industrial tablets.

As well as selling the Windows Embedded family of operating systems for embedded electronics, Microsoft’s Windows Embedded business group utilises its Intelligent Systems Initiative to help clients leverage the data output of the Internet of Things.

Microsoft is touting its applications such as SQL Server to manage data in the Internet-of-Things environment, Windows Azure cloud solutions to provide common computing and integration, its various business intelligence tools to analyse data from connected devices and networks, and its various system management tools to manage the whole fabric.

With a broad family of existing product offerings and industry experience mean that Microsoft is well positioned to support a whole fabric of embedded operating systems, database handling, cloud services and Internet-of-Things derived business intelligence products built around the Internet of Things, not just operating systems for isolated embedded devices.

Due to their breadth of experience, Microsoft is one of the few technology providers that can be reasonably be expected to provide a complete technology stack for the Internet of Things, as a one-stop-shop solution provider.

Microsoft’s Intelligent Systems Initiative complements the Windows Embedded product line, helping clients to leverage the data traffic that the Internet of Things generates by providing database, authentication, analytical and visualisation capabilities for IoT data, targeting markets such as the automotive, manufacturing and retail point-of-sale industries.

With their portfolio of Windows Embedded operating systems, you can scale to fit the hardware capabilities available in the embedded devices used, with hardware limitations such as small size, low energy consumption, and limited memory or processing power.

The familiar Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is aimed at very lightweight microcontrollers with significant memory constraints, such as the well-known mbed platform – whilst other offerings in the Windows Embedded family such as Windows Embedded Compact 2013, Windows Embedded Automotive 7, Windows Embedded 8 Handheld and Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry are aimed at different market segments including automotive devices such as in-car entertainment and navigation, industrial applications, or specialised handheld terminals or data entry devices.

Windows Embedded devices can be managed as Microsoft Active Directory objects, allowing good security and also making the administration of a network of portable, embedded devices a relatively familiar task for system and network administrators who already work with Active Directory in a Windows network environment.

Furthermore. Windows Embedded operating systems can also leverage Microsoft’s core development tools and platforms such as C#, Visual Basic, .NET and Visual Studio, meaning that Windows Embedded customers have access to an extremely large worldwide community of developers who already have extensive familiarity and certification in using these common development tools.

Developers can also extend the power beyond the operating system itself by leveraging Microsoft’s portfolio of server and cloud solutions to fuel Microsoft’s services approach for the Internet of Things and to provide analysis and visualisation of the data traffic from the IoT.

Microsoft’s complementary capabilities include SQL Server, System Centre, the Windows Azure platform, Forefront Client Security and Sharepoint Server, among others. The integration of these capabilities with Windows Embedded operating systems enable Microsoft to provide its own internally-developed and in-house supported structured stack of Internet of Things solutions in a way that few other companies can match.

With Windows Embedded, device manufacturers have access to familiar development tools such as Visual Studio 2012 and Expression Blend 5 that help reduce time to market, and support for a variety of security and anti-malware features ensures the solution is secure and stable.

Features like Bitlocker and compatibility with a variety of anti-malware solutions help protect the integrity of the device and the data. Other features such as Windows Secure Boot and Hibernate-Once-Resume-Many protect the device during bootup to prevent the loading of unauthorised apps and to ensure that all devices start up consistently every time, important in a remote embedded deployment where maintenance is impossible or undesirable.

The modular nature of Windows Embedded 8 Standard provides OEMs with the flexibility to tailor their solution precisely to the customer’s needs, with each component addressing a variety of aspects of the platform, including the bootable core, Windows functionality, industry-specific needs, the launching of custom shells and the use of write filters and lockdown features.

Other customisation tools include the Image Builder Wizard and Image Configuration Editor, both of which enable you to omit unwanted functionality and reduce memory requirements as well as potential security vulnerabilities that may exist in unneeded components.

As some of the tools from Microsoft are familiar with a huge proportion of software engineers, developing your IoT product or system’s embedded firmware and other code can be somewhat streamlined – leaving you with the hardware and networking design issues. This is where the LX Group can partner with you to develop any or all stages and bring your ideas to life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If your organisation is considering the ThingWorx plaftorm – or other systems, our engineers are equipped with the tools and experience to bring your ideas to life. To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To find out if XOBXOB is an ideal fit, or to explore other options to solve your problems – join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

Today, Internet-of-Things networks (and, more generally, Wireless Sensor Networks, which are wirelessly networked but not necessarily Internet-connected) are finding use in an increasing range of consumer, industrial and medical applications. Such networks often employ a large number of distributed nodes without interconnecting wires, which can’t practically be connected to the power grid, and therefore it is attractive to keep the need for battery recharging and replacement to an absolute minimum.

This can be achieved with the use of efficient, careful battery design choices as well as ambient energy harvesting technology to self-power small, efficient wireless network nodes from energy sources such as light, waste heat and vibration in the environment and highly energy-efficient design practices both at the hardware and software layers to keep the overall need for power to a minimum.

For some systems it is practical to use batteries alone – for example, lithium-ion, lithium-polymer or nickel-metal hydride batteries – and rely on user intervention to simply recharge and replace the batteries where needed. The batteries may be left internally, inside the device, with the system being plugged into a power supply via a charging port – perhaps using a low-power standard power-supplying interface such as USB – when the device requires a recharge, as opposed to the traditional method of removing and swapping the batteries.

In this sort of application, battery management and charging ICs such as the Microchip MCP73833 Li-polymer / Li-ion charge management controller can be of use to control the recharge of a Li-ion cell, as can buck/boost converters such as the Texas Instruments TPS63031.

A buck/boost converter like this allows a regulated output voltage to be generated from input voltages both higher and lower than the desired output voltage – an output of 500mA at 3.3V, in this case, from an input voltage anywhere from 2.4 to 5.5 volts. This allows a battery such as a two-cell NiMH, three-cell NiMH, or single-cell Li-ion / Li-polymer to be used efficiently and charged and discharged across the entire usable part of its discharge curve.

When it comes to choosing different battery chemistries for a particular application environment, non-rechargeable alkaline batteries are very cheap, widely available and are ideal for low-current applications at room temperature.

If a particular application system consumes very little power then it may be economically viable to choose disposable alkaline batteries that require user replacement once or twice a year.

Alkaline batteries do have two major disadvantages – poor low-temperature performance and relatively limited high-current performance. The available current from an alkaline battery is limited significantly in cold-weather environments, and at high discharge currents the total energy capacity available from the battery is limited.

Non-rechargeable lithium batteries tend to offer substantially increased performance at low temperatures as well as higher discharge current capability.

When it comes to rechargeable batteries, nickel metal hydride (NiMH) cells are the workhorse chemistry of modern rechargeable batteries, with a better lifetime across many charge and discharge cycles without the “memory effect” that affects nickel-cadmium cells.

A typical NiMH cell will have a cell voltage of 1.2 volts instead of the usual 1.5 volts expected from an alkaline battery – this may be significant in some designs but is generally acceptable. Despite this, NiMH batteries generally perform better than alkaline batteries at low temperatures and don’t decline quite as quickly as current draw increases, as well as providing the benefit of being rechargeable.

Lead-acid batteries can provide very high discharge currents for demanding applications such as mechatronics, with good energy density, but can perform poorly at low temperatures and can be subject to permanent damage through cell sulfation if they are kept discharged for any significant length of time.

Lithium-ion cells provide good energy density and many convenient cycles of repeated charge and discharge, but this battery chemistry requires precise control to avoid over-discharge or over-charge conditions which can permanently damage the battery. Despite their risk of fire and damage if mishandled, lithium-ion batteries provide very good discharge current capability, good energy density, and the ability to survive many repeated charge cycles, embedded inside devices which are charged and used without their battery ever being removed or replaced.

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

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

In many applications, solar photovoltaics are the most familiar, relatively mature choice for low-power network nodes operating outdoors, for example in agricultural and meteorological instruments. However, other technologies suitable for extracting small amounts of power from the ambient environment exist.

For example, a wireless sensor node set up to monitor bearing wear in a generator could employ a piezoelectric crystal as a vibrational energy harvester, converting motor vibration into usable energy, or a thermoelectric generator mounted on a hot exhaust could harvest a small amount of otherwise wasted energy from the thermal gradient.

Solar photovoltaics are a common choice for sensing, control or measurement devices that are located outdoors where sunlight is available, and that consume a relatively small amount of power. For a small, low-power embedded device that receives a reasonable amount of sun each day, a moderately small solar panel is perfectly capable of supplying sufficient power, on average, to run a lightweight wireless network node consisting of a microcontroller, sensors and an embedded low-power radio such as an 802.15.4 system.

However, solar power is intrinsically intermittent and is only available for a fraction of the day, on average. To allow the system to have access to the current it needs to function when needed, solar-powered wireless devices almost always need to incorporate a small amount of energy storage in the form of a battery or supercapacitor in conjunction with the solar cell.

At this point you may start to wonder what the most appropriate power solutions are for your IoT or other products, and it’s no secret that the options are wide and varied. However the success of your product is predicated on its usability and thus autonomy from mains power.

For more guidance on this matter, from consulting to total product design from idea to delivering to the end user, the LX Group can be your partner in success. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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