All posts tagged: things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If this platform is of interest to your organisation – and you need an experienced partner to progress with – join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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.

As an interesting example of larger, more established companies taking longer to bring a new product or service to market – IBM is now in the open-source cloud development platform arena with their new Bluemix service.

This is a new next-generation cloud development platform based on IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture and the open-source Cloud Foundry project. Bluemix is a Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) offering that promises to deliver enterprise-level features and services that are easy to integrate into cloud applications.

As an open-standards-based cloud platform for building, managing, and running apps of all types, Bluemix offers the opportunity to work with the web, mobile, big data, Internet-of-Things applications and smart devices.

Bluemix capabilities include support for Java, mobile back-end development and application monitoring, as well as features from ecosystem partners, all in a cloud-based platform.

This enables organisations and developers to easily create, deploy and manage applications in the cloud, delivering enterprise-level services that can easily integrate with your cloud applications without you needing to know how to install or configure them.

IBM envisioned Bluemix as a system that would answer the needs and challenges facing application developers, their business counterparts and users. For developers, this means a system that significantly reduces the time needed to create and provision the application and allows for flexible capacity in terms of storage as well as delivering flexible capacity for bandwidth and processing.

It handles the back-end infrastructure without requiring the developer to spend time managing it, and allows developers to concentrate on what they do best – developing innovative applications.

For businesses, Bluemix represents a system that allows users to easily create cloud applications without needing a high level of technical knowhow, enabling businesses to rapidly adjust to customer requirements by leveraging the flexibility cloud applications provide – such as instant updates, new features and automatic deployment, empowering and enabling business users to leverage their resources in the most efficient way possible.

Rapid adjustment to changing customer needs and the automatic deployment of new features provides high responsiveness from the customer perspective, and their needs can be addressed very quickly once they make them known. Cloud-based cost savings also reduce the total cost of ownership.

With projections of billions of new Internet-of-Things devices being sold and connected over coming years, with corresponding growth in the amount of network traffic they generate, there have been a number of new technologies emerging that help developers connect and use the data coming from these devices.

One interesting example is MQTT, the Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol. MQTT is a connectivity protocol specifically designed for machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things applications, as a very lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

In response to projections for the IoT and the rapidly growing numbers of connected devices, IBM has developed an Internet of Things Cloud – which at the core is based around an MQTT instance. The IBM IoT cloud is currently in beta but is quite functional and you can use it to develop or experiment with publishing and retrieving data from your connected Internet-of-Things devices.

Once you have a device connected to the IBM Internet-of-Things Cloud you can build an app around the data coming from that device, and this is where Bluemix comes in. Using a combination of the IBM IoT Cloud and IBM Bluemix you can have a complete cloud-based based solution for your IoT applications, and Bluemix already has a service that is part of its catalogue to connect to the IBM IoT Cloud.

In addition to the service, Bluemix has a boilerplate for IoT applications which stands up a Node-RED instance allowing you to design data flows for your application. For example you can use Bluemix along with the IoT cloud to build Internet-of-Things applications based on data coming in from a hardware device such as a Texas Instruments Sensor Tag.

You can use Node-RED, running on top of Bluemix and the IoT Cloud, to collect sensor data over the tag’s wireless Bluetooth Low Energy interface, store it in a MongoDB database and create a REST API exposing the data, without writing any code yourself.

Included with IBM’s IoT Cloud there are a number of “recipes”, which are basically example IoT scenarios that can get you up and running quickly with common applications. The recipes contain instructions on how to set up the hardware as well as provide you with the code needed to connect the device to the IoT Cloud and publish data. What makes using these recipes even easier is the quickstart service that is part of the IoT Cloud.

When using the quickstart service you don’t have to create an account or register any devices, you just run the code given to you in the recipe, head to the quickstart page, enter the MAC address of the device and you can see the device data being published to the IoT Cloud.

To get an IoT device and demonstration application up and running quickly it couldn’t be easier. For example, a combined Beaglebone Black and TI Sensor Tag application is one of the recipes provided, supporting the TI Sensor Tag which has a number of sensors on it you can use for many different and interesting use cases, connected to a Beaglebone Black which removes the need for a power-hungry local PC running all the time.

All the hardware needed, the Sensor Tag, the Beaglebone Black, and a Bluetooth LE USB adapter, costs less than 100 dollars, and once you’ve got the hardware you can quickly follow the documentation provided to start publishing data from sensors to the cloud using a combination of Bluemix, IBM IoT Cloud and NodeRED.

Although not the first in the market, IBM’s offering is powerful and scalable – and could be the solution to your IoT product requirements. Here at the LX Group, our experienced award-winning engineering team can harness Bluemix for your success.

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

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

The ARM group has recently announced the new ARM mbed IoT Device Platform and an accompanying free operating system, aiming to build on top of the existing mbed embedded development ecosystem to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of your new Internet-of-Things connected products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bug Labs’ cloud-based Swarm platform is an Internet-of-Things development platform that lets you easily add new Internet-connected services to your existing design or product.

Whether it’s a simple sensor device or a complex industrial system, Swarm provides everything you need to get your product up and running quickly with the new value that Internet-of-Things services can add, helping you to innovate in the rapidly growing IoT market.

Swarm abstracts the raw functionalities, such as sensors, actuators or transceivers, that any hardware device is equipped with and exposes these hardware functions as web services, allowing simple drag-and-drop creation of applications that interact with a diverse range of hardware capabilities.

The system is based around “resources”, which are applications or devices that are configured to produce or consume data over Swarm. A resource may be a physical device such as a smartphone, tablet, an embedded hardware platform or a microcontroller equipped with a Wi-Fi or Ethernet chipset for network connectivity, or it could be a mobile or Web application.

Anything that can communicate through HTTP can be configured to join a swarm and begin producing and consuming data, and Swarm makes it easy to acquire data from or to control connected devices over the Internet or local network using JavaScript or plain HTTP requests.

Resources are organised into collections referred to as swarms. Once a swarm of resources has been created, users may configure it to allow their own resources to participate as well as invite another user’s resources to become members. The owner of the swarm can control what level of access (data production, consumption, or both) each resource in the swarm has.

Once multiple resources have been grouped together as members of a swarm, a resource can communicate and share data with other resources in that swarm. You can easily control the level of access that a resource has to the data within a swarm, and grant a resource permission to produce data, consume data generated by other devices in the swarm, or both.

You can invite another user’s resources into your swarms and accept invitations to place your resources in somebody else’s swarms, making it possible to share your devices and your data with others easily and securely to the extent that you choose to.

Swarm’s RESTful configuration API makes it easy to create resources and swarms and to add resources to swarms as data producers, consumers or both. Once your resources are configured, the Participation API makes it easy to get your resources interacting with the swarms they are members of, and begin producing and consuming data.

Swarm Dashboard is a “homepage” for your device, which provides a fast way to get up, and running with Internet-of-Things value added to your connected product. A dashboard provides secure, real-time, visual access to all the important features and data your device offers, creating a high level, easy-to-understand yet powerful way for your users and customers to experience your device online.

You can choose from hundreds of colourful pre-built graphs, charts, gauges, tables and text displays to design and build your dashboard, all from an easy-to-use graphical interface, which does not require advanced programming expertise to set up. All the elements of your Swarm dashboards are optimised for the best viewing experience on different customer’s devices – smartphone, tablet or PC.

A Swarm Dashboard is just the starting point for the construction of additional applications that can enhance your customers’ experience with your product, because every dashboard is powered by Swarm’s APIs that can be used to build extended dashboards and more complex applications, incorporating services such as event notifications and alerts, real-time visualisations, analytics and reporting, historical activity logs, compliance testing and integration into your existing customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning systems.

Developing applications for embedded computing hardware and other types of connected Internet-of-Things devices can be a complex effort which requires specialised tools and skills because the application code needs to run on the device itself, which is usually a constrained operating environment with limited memory and resources.

But what if you could run the application code elsewhere, in the cloud, and access the device over a network connection? Then you’d be able to write mobile and web-based applications with easier-to-use tools and languages such as JavaScript and Python, without worrying about resource constraints on the embedded device so much, and Swarm helps you to do exactly that.

Swarm lets you write applications using standard web development tools which can then run anywhere you like, whether it’s your PC, your browser, or a cloud-based application server. Swarm coordinates the communications between your application and the connected device via any IP network connection – via Wi-Fi, cellular, satellite or Ethernet networking hardware – securely and reliably in real time.

All this is made possible by intelligently converting hardware-specific I/O interfaces into a collection of easily understood and addressed RESTful Web APIs. Bug Labs’ dedicated Swarm developer portal provides more information for developers on Swarm, its architecture and its open-source code and APIs.

As another option for your existing or new IoT-enabled project, our experienced award-winning engineering team can harness Swarm for your success. Getting started is easy – join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

The Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance is an organisation, which has served as a resource centre and industry leader since 2008 – whose goal is to seek the establishment of Internet Protocol as the dominant, open standard adopted by industry as the basis for the connectivity of “smart objects”, machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things networks and applications.

The IPSO Alliance provides a foundation for industry growth by fostering awareness, providing education, generating research, promoting the industry, and creating
a better understanding of IP and other open protocols and standards and the role they can play in the Internet of Things.

Through the work of the IPSO Alliance, many industries have come to realise the benefits associated with using the Internet Protocol within their Internet-of-Things and M2M products and applications. The Alliance is moving forward from explaining “Why use IP in IoT devices” to “How to use IP” down to the individual device level in connected IoT networks.

While the Alliance will continue to educate and inform on the numerous fundamental benefits of IP, it has embarked on defining the set of appropriate protocols, architecture and data definitions for IoT “Smart Objects” so that engineers and product developers working in this field will have access to the necessary tools in order “to build the IoT right” using open standards in a way that the IPSO Alliance considers to be the most valuable for everybody.

Primary goals of the IPSO Alliance are to promote the Internet Protocol as the universal, most secure and most resilient infrastructure on which to base ever more critical and ubiquitous connectivity, and to carry on their core mission of “Internet Protocol enabling the Internet of Things”. It is a goal of the IPSO Alliance to promote the use of IP as the premier solution for access and communication for smart objects as well as to invest in innovation in IP- and open-standards-based Internet-of-Things technology.

The Alliance aims to uphold open standards for IoT connectivity including but not limited to IP, supporting the Internet Engineering Task Force and other technical standards organisations in the development of standards for smart objects and Internet-of-Things connectivity, building on the technical work of these bodies with promotion, outreach and education.

The main objective of the Alliance is not to define new technologies and standards, but to document the use of IP-based technologies defined by the standards-building organisations such as IETF with focus on support by the Alliance of various use cases.

Furthermore, the IPSO aims to promote the use of the Internet Protocol by developing and publishing white papers and case studies and providing updates
on open standards-building progress from associations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, with a particular focus on Internet-of-Things applications and what IPSO refers to as “Smart Objects”, which promote Web-scale interoperability between IP-connected devices and IoT applications.

The Alliance has recently broadened its standards vision to include education on the best practice for the use of IP and other open protocols to create end-to-end solutions for the Internet of Things, promoting the use of open standards, not just through awareness that these open standards exist but also through education of developers on how to actually use them most effectively in IoT products.

With an aim to understand the industries and markets where M2M and IoT devices can have an effective role in growth when connected using the Internet Protocol, and to organise interoperability tests that will allow members and interested parties to show that products and services using IP-based connectivity for “smart objects” can work together and meet industry standards for communication, the alliance is a beneficial group to further the use of IP in various products.

IPSO aims to build stronger relationships around IP and other open standards within the industry and to create a better understanding of IP and its role in connecting Smart Objects, fostering awareness that the Internet Protocol is an existing, proven networking solution based on open standards that is already deployed and demonstrated to be eminently scalable.

The availability of Internet Protocol, including IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, on constrained embedded systems and low-cost microcontrollers with very limited memory and other resources has made possible a new kind of device and a new kind of Internet, with ubiquitous interoperability between “smart objects” and connected Internet-of-Things devices.

The Internet Engineering Task Force specifies a set of standard protocols for Constrained Resource Environment (CoRE) IP-enabled networks, including the Constrained Resource Application Protocol or CoAP, applicable to low-power and low-bandwidth embedded devices.

CoAP is an application protocol for machines and connected devices, as HTTP is for the World Wide Web, but designed specifically for machine interaction and operation over networks of resource-constrained devices. IPSO’s Smart Object Guidelines provide a common design pattern, an object model that can effectively use CoAP to provide high-level interoperability between “smart objects” and connected software applications on other devices and services.

For more information on the IPSO alliance, you can visit their website from the following URL – http://www.ipso-alliance.org/. And if you’re looking for a partner to help bring your new or existing products to the Internet-of-Things, we have the experience, expertise and team to get the job done. 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.

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.

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.

In the adoption of Agile project management practices to the development of hardware or combined hardware-software engineering projects, and the adaptations to common Agile techniques that may be applied for best results with hardware projects, let’s consider some of the challenges that may be faced and how you might address them.

For example, do you develop software and firmware only after you’ve developed and assembled an iteration of physical prototype hardware? Or do you develop an iteration of your software and firmware concurrently with the development and assembly of the corresponding hardware and use other methods such as simulation to stand in for the hardware until an iteration of the physical hardware is ready?

When using Agile project management techniques, it is desirable to be able to rapidly produce and demonstrate a working prototype of your technology and to rapidly iterate and refine and build on each prototype without necessarily having a perfectly engineered product ready to go at the first iteration. When you’re working with hardware, however, you need to deal with the lead time required to source components, to fabricate printed circuit boards, to have prototype layouts assembled by an external pick-and-place assembly contractor or to have custom plastics injection-moulded and so on.

What if the lead-time required for these processes is longer than the time allocated to a particular iteration or sprint? These types of external supply and manufacturing dependencies are unique to hardware, and aren’t present in software development – so they present a unique challenge when trying to apply agile methods to the management of hardware projects. While these constraints may seem like a daunting challenge to adoption of Agile in the hardware engineering industry, techniques and tools such as in-house rapid prototyping, 3D printing, CNC milling of simple PCBs and the like present part of a potential solution, allowing for rapid, agile iteration of hardware prototypes.

A prototype iteration of a hardware system doesn’t have to physically involve hardware, either. Simulation and visualisation tools can play a valuable role of validating the design and performance of all the components that come together into a new product, even before a prototype is actually physically constructed. FPGAs and logic synthesis may also be valuable tools here, allowing for validation of soft cores before physical hardware is constructed. One of the challenges for combined software and hardware development is that software can normally be developed fairly rapidly and the development broken down into smaller iterative chunks. Hardware, on the other hand, may require months to show a working component or feature, which has been implemented starting from scratch.

If the software development must wait for the hardware to be created before final testing, this can create significant testing delays. Hardware must also often follow strictly defined process models, meet compliance standards, and it can be difficult to make late changes to hardware. This means that feature creep can be difficult and expensive in hardware engineering, although Agile methods are traditionally more accepting of “feature creep” compared to traditional “waterfall” management methods.

Traditionally, the priority for embedded software, for example, would be to write the hardware drivers first, to allow evaluation of the new device and to allow testing. Testing is more complex when software must fit within a small, cheap microcontroller with limited resources in an embedded system, with timing well controlled to prevent race conditions and other timing issues. This means that at some point testing on the actual hardware is generally important. A problem often seen when businesses who create hardware and the software that runs it face when trying to “go Agile” is that they attempt to take methods and practices developed for software (such as Scrum, an Agile project management framework), and try to use it for everything, including hardware development.

Scrum is based upon “sprints” of relatively short lengths (two weeks to 30 days), with highly defined tasks that must be completed during the sprint. The nature of software development makes this an excellent framework for rapid progress; but scrum isn’t necessarily the best framework for hardware development. If the products are in a highly regulated industry, such as medical or aviation hardware, then the documentation must follow industry requirements for specification and design, as well as normal testing and functional requirements documentation. This makes it extremely difficult to use scrum by itself, since the processes for hardware are frequently much more rigid, defined, and design-oriented than those normally defined by scrum.

On the software side, because software must interface, communicate with, and control hardware, development issues using Agile are more complex for combined software/hardware projects, and the stories (definition of the functions for a specific feature) that the developers define for each sprint are accordingly more complex. Large projects with large amounts of hardware and software dependencies can be even more challenging.

One method of dealing with hardware that isn’t ready to test is to decouple software and hardware development, via an abstraction layer, to allow software development to continue more rapidly. Can the interfaces to the hardware module be specified, and the specifics abstracted away to allow other parts of the hardware and software development to continue around the hardware component that is behind schedule? The challenge is to find a method that allows the rapid development of software with concurrent development of the hardware, that can best meet the requirements of each process. A good approach can be the use of different Agile techniques for hardware projects than those used in software projects. Agile techniques are not abandoned – simply implemented a little differently, with different specific Agile techniques chosen for the most effective results.

With Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM), which has been described as an “agile without using Agile” technique with broad applicability outside the software engineering sector, the emphasis is on the delivery of at least a component or piece of the hardware that works, in the case of an embedded computing or other combined hardware-software project, in order to allow the development or testing of the software that will work on that hardware component. This is very different from the traditional “waterfall” project management approach, where the entire hardware system needs to be built first. While the “scrum” method for software projects is based on sprints with small portions of the software completed at a time, hardware development can benefit from a different approach.

With Agile, both hardware and software features are broken down into smaller chunks – only the Agile methodology can be a bit different for each. Once software is working, it can be deployed either on any available hardware modules that are ready, or in a test or simulation environment. This allows the early identification and fixing of race issues and bugs that arise, and reduces the amount of “fixing” and lengthy hours reworking that must occur during late integration and testing when the hardware is ready.

And that’s the goal of successful agile development – to reduce the total time required, decreasing errors, mistakes and the chances of unforseen events, which will increase the time to market for your new or revised product. Here at the LX Group you can leverage our product development expertise and experience for your total benefit. Our consultants, engineers and experts in many fields can guide you to your goal of product 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.

The Arrayent Connect Platform is an Internet-of-Things platform that enables you to connect your products to smartphone and Web applications, providing the value-add of cloud services and IoT connectivity with low cost and simplicity, particularly aimed at existing manufacturers of appliances and consumer electronics who want to add the value of Internet-of-Things connectivity into their existing products.

Arrayent’s IoT platform has been optimised to maximise your product’s value by keeping extra hardware costs at a minimum, keeping devices simple, and pushing the majority of the IoT complexity to the cloud where possible.

By ensuring that product installation “just works” and is friendly for end users. Arrayent’s plug-and-play installation process is designed to maximise customer satisfaction and reduce the costs of customer support for installation.

Arrayent also aim to support strong scalability to as many as millions of devices. Therefore with the Arrayent IoT platform you can reliably and securely connect your products to the Internet for the same service cost, whether you’re connecting ten thousand devices or ten million.

There are four key components that make up the Arrayent Connect IoT platform – the Arrayent Connect Cloud, the Arrayent Connect Agent, the Arrayent mobile framework, and the Arrayent data analytics service.

The Arrayent Connect Cloud is essentially a cloud-based Internet-of-Things operating system, and it is the heart of the Arrayent IoT platform. The Connect Cloud hosts your virtual device, the digital copy of your physical device to which your mobile apps connect. In this fashion, complex application code can reside in the cloud, enabling reduced overall product cost and maximising product extensibility.

Arrayent Connect Cloud supports a growing list of services that are common across all Internet of Things applications. These services make it easy to functionality to your connected products, which adds value to the lives of your connected customers.

The growing lists of features that add value to and extend the functionality of your products include alerts, over-the-air firmware updates, time series storage for data analysis, data services, user account management and more.

The Arrayent Connect Agent helps embedded developers to bring reliable connected products to market, functioning as a firmware module that manages your device’s session with the Arrayent Cloud and abstracts these responsibilities away from your embedded development team – enabling you to focus your resources on delivering a great product experience to your customers, with the emphasis being on developing a great product, not spending all your resources just on the IoT and cloud connectivity infrastructure.

The Arrayent Connect Agent currently supports Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Z-Wave local- and personal-area networks and computing platforms from major silicon vendors such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Marvell, running operating systems such as Linux or FreeRTOS. And because of the cross-platform design of the Connect Agent, Arrayent can quickly spin up support for other platforms if a customer need exists.

The mobile framework for Arrayent’s Internet-of-Things platform helps mobile app developers to rapidly bring intuitive, reliable mobile apps to market for IoT connectivity with devices. The framework abstracts away the complexities involved with using the lower-level web service API and interfaces of Arrayent’s machine-to-machine Internet-of-Things platform into a more friendly presentation layer so that mobile developers can focus on building unique, branded user interfaces for your products.

The Arrayent Data Analytics service delivers business intelligence reports common to all your products, such as device locations, interaction between devices and apps, peak usage trends, and more. Arrayent’s “Data Mart” services aggregate, normalise and filter your device data for connectivity with your existing analytics solutions.

However, careful communication with consumers and market research is likely to be important here, as consumers are likely to be unhappy with any trend towards Internet-of-Things home automation and consumer electronic appliances “spying” on the consumer – even through behaviour such as turning lights on or opening garage doors at certain times – and transmitting that information back to the vendor for the purpose of business intelligence analytics without any obvious value, safeguards and control returned to the consumer.

The Arrayent platform supports over-the-air downloads for firmware updates to devices and network gateways, allowing embedded devices to always maintain the latest updates for optimal functionality and security into the future.

Furthermore, with the Arrayent firmware download management application you can control the safe delivery and phased release of new firmware to the network, even in large-scale networks with hundreds of thousands of connected devices.

Arrayent’s IoT cloud platform typically achieves end-to-end response times of about 200 to 400 milliseconds out to the Internet and back again, providing low latency for your connected devices. The platform is hosted across redundant servers mirrored across geographically separated data centres.

If a hardware or network failure takes down one server, the data is still available at other locations, providing confidence that the Internet-of-Things connectivity cloud for your products is reliable. The platform supports alerts via email, SMS, iOS and Android push notifications and more, in response to programmable triggers from virtually any input data stream. Alerts can also trigger response actions in the product that generated the alert, or in other connected devices on the network.

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.

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.