All posts tagged: things

The MeshWorks Internet-of-Things platform from California Eastern Laboratories is a turnkey wireless solution which connects sensors and peripherals to the cloud in a way that makes previously complex mesh networks and wireless sensor networks very fast and easy to implement.

This includes connectivity between the wireless mesh network, the LAN, the Internet and cloud services, for anyone with rudimentary Python scripting skills. The complete MeshWorks platform consists of three key components – a wireless Personal Area Network (PAN) which is powered by CEL’s MeshConnect 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 radio modules. Programming is via a GUI-based interface built around the MeshWorks software suite, and the cloud service which is facilitated by connecting your wireless sensor network to the Internet via either the MeshWorks Ethernet Gateway or the OpenTether Cellular Gateway.

CEL provides a variety of reference designs which allow you to easily get started engineering, combining the EM35x MeshConnect family of 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless modules with a multitude of different sensors and control node choices representative of those that are popular in Internet-of-Things and connected-home applications. CEL’s turnkey wireless solutions enable you to unite the “Internet of Everything” product ecosystem with ease.

The MeshWorks platform was designed specifically to address the wireless connectivity needs of the industrial and environmental sensing markets. By using CEL’s family of EM35x wireless modules in conjunction with the MeshWorks cloud service platform, virtually any sensor or control node can easily be connected to the cloud for state-of-the-art control and data analytics, allowing you to get to market quickly and easily.

Furthermore the included library of reference designs for proven hardware implementations and solutions include block diagrams, detailed schematics, bill of materials information, and much other relevant information to help you get started with a MeshWorks-based solution for your next product.

The MeshConnect line of 802.15.4/ZigBee and other radio solutions combine industry-leading transceiver ICs with other RF components such as RFIC switches and power amplifiers, providing certified and qualified solutions which enable customers to reduce their design and certification phases of development, enabling wireless connectivity for your products relatively easily.

The MeshConnect EM35x Ember Companion Kit is designed for interoperability with development kits for the Ember platform, with each radio module in this kit soldered onto a carrier board making it pin-for-pin compatible with the Ember development board. CEL’s MeshConnect EM35x Mini Modules Programming Fixture is a programming assembly designed to be used with the CEL ZICM35xSPx MeshConnect Mini Modules series, which are small mesh-networked radio modules ready for compact and relatively low cost integration into your next product, adding wireless mesh network and Internet-of-Things capability with ease.

The Mini Modules Programming Fixture is useful for production programming or during application development when multiple firmware images are required to be flashed onto a Mini Module during testing and debugging. This programming assembly needs to be used in conjunction with the ISA3 Ember Debug/Insight Adapter from Silicon Labs for the actual programming of the chips.

Another option is to use MeshConnect EM357 USB Sticks which enable hardware vendors to quickly integrate 802.15.4/ZigBee connectivity into any computer or device with a USB port, without any RF design experience required. They can be used as a hardware development platform for rapid prototyping and as a companion to the MeshConnect EM357 modules.

CEL also offers reliable Ethernet and Cellular-based gateways, providing Internet connectivity to a wireless sensor network or mesh network with a secure, low-cost solution. Based on the Mini Module line of Ember EM35x-based IEEE 802.15.4 radio transceivers from Silicon Labs, these gateways run the industry-leading EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack.

The MeshWorks OpenTether Cellular Gateway connects a MeshWorks sensor and control network to the cloud anywhere out in the field, as long as cellular service is available in that location. These gateways can also come pre-configured to connect a MeshWorks network directly to Exosite’s cloud service, and are specifically designed to support the MeshWorks turnkey wireless solution for connecting sensor and control peripherals to the cloud.

By writing a simple python script, the gateway can be configured to connect to virtually any cloud service or database using common Internet transport protocols, with Exosite connectivity supported out of the box with a supplied reference script.

The MeshWorks OpenTether Sensor Node is also available as a part of the MeshWorks solution family, and this product is an ideal starting point for the evaluation of the MeshWorks platform. The OpenTether Sensor Node has 10 built-in sensor capabilities to enable you to quickly prototype many common sensing and automation applications. Additionally, it contains a built-in I/O expansion port that you can use to connect to any external sensor or control node using I2C, analog, or digital I/O.

The Sensor Node comes pre-loaded with CEL’s MeshWorks firmware, which allows users to quickly write Python scripts to customise the system for their particular needs. The OpenTether Sensor Node utilises CEL’s Mini Module line of Ember EM35x-based transceivers built around Silicon Labs 802.15.4 SoCs as with the other hardware products in this family, and the Sensor Node also incorporates the EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack.

CEL’s MeshConnect EM358x Mini Modules are based on the Ember EM3588 802.15.4/ZigBee microcontroller system-on-chip from Silicon Labs. They are pin-compatible extensions to CEL’s leading product line of EM357-based radio network modules, and they are available in both low and high power output options (+8dBm and +20dBm transmit power) to accommodate designers with different range, performance and power consumption requirements.

The Silicon Labs EM3588 system-on-chip incorporates a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver with a baseband modem, a hard-wired MAC and an embedded 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with 64 kB of internal RAM and 512 kB of flash memory. The MeshConnect EM357 High Temperature Mini Modules from CEL provide the same high performance RF solution and high performance ZigBee stack in a module that is specifically designed to address the thermal challenges associated with heat-intensive applications, based on the Ember EM357 802.15.4/ZigBee radio network system-on-chip.

MeshConnect EM357 Mini Modules offer the smallest footprint of all Ember-based RF modules available today, combined with the power of the Cortex-M3 advanced 32-bit microcontroller architecture, the strong performance of the EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack, a link budget of up to 123 dB, and a strong surrounding ecosystem of gateways, sensor products, cloud services and reference designs for implementing your wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things solutions.

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 Meshworks 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

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

Intel’s new Edison development platform is the first in a series of low-cost, product-ready, general-purpose embedded computing platforms from Intel that are aimed at lowering the barriers to entry for work in Internet-of-Things and wearable computing applications for the entire community of developers and users, from hobbyists and makers to consumer electronics developers and industrial Internet-of-Things engineers.

The Edison packs a robust set of features into its small size, delivering strong performance built around a leading-edge dual-core Intel Atom system-on-chip combined with a separate single-core microcontroller, along with good hardware durability and a broad spectrum of hardware interfaces and software support.

These versatile features allow the platform to deliver strong value to a wide range of developers and users working with Internet-of-Things, wearable computing, and other embedded computing applications.

Thanks to the integrated Wi-Fi, integrated Bluetooth Low Energy, onboard memory and generous storage, and support for more than 30 different industry-standard hardware I/O interfaces via its 70-pin connector for integration with peripheral devices and other hardware, the Edison is ready for a wide range of applications.

Furthermore with 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, using the Edison with many open-source community software tools such as these enable ease of adoption and also inspire third-party app developers to build apps for consumers and industrial applications on top of the Intel Edison platform.

This is Intel’s second product targeted partially at the hobbyist, inventor and maker market, following Intel’s Arduino-compatible Galileo platform – however it isn’t limited to that market at all. The Edison development board is a computer only about the size of an SD card, and its unique combination of small size, power, rich capabilities and ecosystem support inspires creativity and enables rapid innovation from prototype to production for professional, hobbyist or education users.

Created for 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, onboard storage and networking capability than a simple 8-bit microcontroller.

During the development process Intel has reported an enthusiastic response to this product from Internet-of-Things entrepreneurs, engineers and the maker community, as well as consumer electronics and industrial machine-to-machine companies.

Intel has decided that in order to best address a broader range of market segments and customer needs, the Intel Edison platform will be extended to a family of different development boards, with notable enhancements over similar existing offerings that include the use of Intel’s leading-edge dual-core Atom system-on-chip, increased I/O capabilities and software support, and a new, simplified industrial design.

These engineering improvements promise greater performance, increased durability and reductions in cost whilst keeping the device very compact. While Intel works to extend the family of its Quark system-on-chips, they have bought the Edison development board to market now in order to meet a broad range of market growth in the embedded and IoT sector.

Edison offers a dual-core, dual-threaded 500 MHz CPU combined with an additional external microcontroller and over 30 different I/O interfaces connected to external systems via a small 70-pin connector, providing a powerful and flexible hardware platform that offers solid performance and good value for wearable or small-form-factor application and hardware development.

System integration is easy as popular networking technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy are supported by the Edison platform with no extra hardware needed, and the board itself is only slightly physically larger than an SD card.

Intel believes the Edison platform will provide more value for embedded computing users with its simplified design process, increased durability and value for money, with this new family of different boards and products offering individuals and small, innovative companies a compelling platform to introduce smart and connected wearable computing designs and Internet-of-Things products that will delight people in new and unexpected ways.

As an example of the Edison platform in action, Intel has demonstrated the Mimo baby monitor from Rest Devices. Based on a tiny Edison-based computer packaged into a toy turtle the size of a baby’s hand, the system receives data from sensors worn on a baby’s clothing, monitoring temperature, breathing, motion and more, and transmits its information to a smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy, eliminating the need for an external receiver.

Besides sending the baby’s data to an app on the parents’ iOS or Android device, this compact Edison-based wearable computer can trigger actions on connected devices, such as an automatic bottle warmer accompanying the system demonstrated by Intel and Rest Devices which also incorporates a networked Intel Edison board inside.

Thanks to the tiny size and ease of integration into existing and new designs, the Edison platform will accelerate the design and production of almost any connected device.

And with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the Edison up and running – which also translates to lowering the cost of the system development 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.

Device Cloud by Etherios is a device management platform and data service that allows you to connect a huge range of devices to Internet-connected applications, anywhere. As a public cloud service, it is designed to provide easy integration between devices and the cloud, facilitating real-time network management and rapid development of machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things applications.

Using Etherios Cloud Connector and the open-source APIs available it is easy to integrate a wide range of client software, including web applications or mobile applications, with Device Cloud.

This public cloud platform provides easy cloud-based management of device networks, secure application messaging and data storage for Internet-of-Things and machine-to-machine networks comprised of wired, wireless networked, cellular and satellite-connected devices. It offers customers centralised management of gateways and connected end-devices, ease of integration via APIs and Etherios’ Cloud Connector, elastic scalability of the cloud platform, allowing easy and cost-effective growth as your device network grows, enterprise-level reliability and industry-leading attention to security.

To get started trying out Device Cloud, you can simply create a free Device Cloud account and enjoy access to Device Cloud services including Device Manager with up to five devices and support for Web services, data streams and SMS connectivity. With a free Developer Edition account you’ll have access to all the features of Device Cloud in order to design, test and prototype your Internet-of-Things or machine-to-machine solution, and you’ll be able to freely evaluate all the functionality and features of Device Cloud for a small network of devices.

There are two Device Cloud hosting centres at present, one in the US and one in Europe. When creating a Device Cloud account you can select which hosting centre to use, allowing latency to be minimised by selecting the hosting location that is geographically closest to the majority of your devices that you will be registering to Device Cloud.

Traditionally, devices were expected to keep a persistent network connection open to Device Cloud, with an occasional keep-alive or heartbeat signal sent to confirm the link while application data was not actively being sent. However, Device Cloud now incorporates SMS support for deployment scenarios where bandwidth costs are high, allowing some actions such as a device reboot to be initiated remotely via SMS.

For more complicated communications, Device Cloud can send an SMS “shoulder tap” to request a connection, causing the device to initiate a traditional connection back to the server over the cellular link only when such a connection is really needed, reducing bandwidth costs. Once connected, web services, requests and UI actions can connect to the device.

Connecting your products into the enterprise network can create new revenue streams, service offerings, and improved customer satisfaction. Etherios Cloud Connector is a software development package that helps to realise these goals by enabling you to securely connect essentially any devices in a machine-to-machine or Internet-of-Things network to the Etherios Device Cloud system. Supported devices range from Arduino boards, Microchip PIC and STM microcontrollers to Freescale and Intel chips, the Raspberry Pi single-board computer and common smartphones. Cloud Connector simplifies integration of your devices with applications and gives you easy, direct access to the data from your devices.

Etherios can help you to build a specific Device Cloud Solution that suits your needs, providing a free Dia framework including reusable software modules and open-source reference code, a free integrated development environment based on the Eclipse IDE that includes helpful examples and tutorials, and other sources of design assistance, including custom application development services. Etherios also offers expertise and services in embedded design, software services, electronic and RF engineering, and printed circuit board layout.

Etherios Cloud Connector is available for Android, Kinetis microcontroller devices and other common embedded platforms, allowing easy connectivity of many different devices to Device Cloud. The large family of “connectors” available simplify the process of managing dynamic hardware and device infrastructure, making it easy to deploy and modify your networks of connected devices and applications.

Highly elastic cloud infrastructure makes it easy to maintain a cloud platform that meets the needs of your expanding network – a complete, scalable, Internet-of-Things toolkit that is cost-effective at any scale.

A pre-built, cloud-based solution can offer fully featured, production-grade capabilities for an initial pilot and proof-of-concept of your Internet-of-Things service or product, and Device Cloud enables application developers to bring a product to market very quickly and easily compared to bespoke solutions.

You could perhaps build your own platform, but only with significant investments in development time and cost in order to achieve the same range of features and functionality that is available from an off-the-shelf solution such as Device Cloud today. The primary benefit of Device Cloud is cost, with world-class scalability, reliability and security offered at an extremely competitive cost.

And with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of IoT systems up and running – which also translates to lowering the cost of the system development through to the final product. 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 panStamp development environment for wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications is based around compact, low-cost microcontroller boards including a built-in sub-gigahertz radio transceiver, providing the necessary connectivity and processing power to create autonomous low-power wireless sensor and actuator nodes with almost everything contained in a 24-pin DIP module that is compact, low-cost, easy to program and to use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is always one of the main goals of IoT product development – time to market. If you have a great prototype or idea – and need to take it to the market, our team of engineers can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product. To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIOT is a relatively new operating system specifically aimed at applications in lightweight embedded systems, wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications. Billed as “the friendly operating system for the Internet of Things”, RIOT is competing with similar offerings such as TinyOS, Contiki and embedded Linux.

This may sound complex, however RIOT is aimed at developer friendliness, allowing you to program like you are used to – using standard programming languages such as C or C++, with standard compilers and tools such as gcc, gdb and valgrind, without the developer wasting time having to learn new or complex development environments.

As a real-time operating system that supports C and C++ development, multithreading and a high degree of modularity, RIOT offers all this with a very small, lightweight footprint that is well suited to use with small microcontrollers with limited memory and resources available.

Thus RIOT is aimed at minimising the learning curve needed for embedded programming whilst also being convenient and accessible to developers with established non-embedded programming experience.

The origins of RIOT can be traced back to 2008, when it was originally forked from the output of a German research program called FeuerWhere, that was dedicated to monitoring the location, safety and environmental conditions of Berlin firefighters working in emergency situations.

After being rebranded and expanded, RIOT was released to the public as an open-source project. RIOT is aimed at bridging the gap between fully-fledged Linux operating systems and existing solutions like Contiki and TinyOS that are aimed primarily at wireless sensor networks. The key design goals of RIOT are memory efficiency, energy efficiency in battery-powered devices, modularity and a developer-friendly programming interface.

RIOT is free, open-source software released under a LGPL license, meaning you can freely re-distribute and modify the software. RIOT is a publicly available community project, with an active community of users and developers online where you can learn more about RIOT, get help with writing an application for RIOT from other users and developers, and participate yourself and contribute to open-source kernel development or the integration of support for new platforms, microcontrollers and peripheral devices.

Implementing systems with RIOT isn’t difficult, due to the numerous supported embedded platforms, including the NXP LPC1768, the Texas Instruments MSP430, ST Microelectronics’ STM32 32-bit ARM family and other Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 devices, as well as common x86 PCs and x86 embedded systems.

The hardware dependent code is reduced to a minimum and abstracted from the kernel itself. For users that are more familiar with non-embedded programming and software development, you can start with the native port of RIOT, allowing you to run RIOT inside a process on Linux or OSX.

This eases the development and debugging of both RIOT itself and the projects you are developing that run on top of RIOT, allowing you to analyse, develop, test and debug your software with familiar, open tools and platforms such as gdb and valgrind, and to create virtual testbeds of multiple instances of RIOT running on a virtualised embedded hardware platform, running simultaneously and networked together with a configurable network topology, using only your PC.

After development and testing of your code on the native port and using this virtualisation capability, it can easily be deployed to your real embedded devices. Integrated system-on-chip devices containing integrated microcontrollers and radio transceivers on a single chip, such as TI’s CC430F6137, can be used, along with development boards and platforms such as the mBed, ScatterWeb MSB-A2, ScatterWeb MSB-430H, Memsic Telos-B, Texas Instruments’ eZ430-RF2500 and EZ430-Chronos.

You can write your code once, and easily compile and deploy the same code for both 16-bit platforms such as the MSP430 and 32-bit platforms such as ARM.

RIOT is specifically designed with features that are aimed at lightweight embedded devices for wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things applications, including very efficient memory and resource use, reliability and robustness in embedded applications running for long periods out in the field without maintenance, a real-time kernel with very low interrupt latency, priority-based scheduling and a tickless scheduler, high energy efficiency, strong code-footprint flexibility and multi-threading with very low threading overhead – making RIOT well suited to the smaller things in the Internet of Things.

RIOT includes core support for IPv6 6LoWPAN (RFC6282 and RFC6775 compliant), UDP, TCP including 6LoWPAN header compression, RFC6550/RFC6719-compliant RPL, and CCN-lite for content-centric networking support.

Furthermore the system includes high-resolution and long-term timers, which is important for embedded applications where timers may need to be running constantly in a device that is deployed for months or years without being rebooted. Other useful tools and utilities are built in, such as support for SHA-256 and Bloom filtering. RIOT includes wiselib built-in, which is a generic C++ algorithm library for heterogeneous, distributed, embedded systems, including algorithms for routing, clustering, time sync, localisation, security, and other common functions.

RIOT includes many built-in drivers for hardware peripherals that allow you to get started with useful hardware applications right out of the box. Some of the supported hardware peripherals include the CC2420, CC1100 and AT86RF231 radio transceivers, the Sensirion SHT11 humidity and temperature sensor, the LTC4150 battery charge/discharge counter, and many other sensors including accelerometers and ultrasonic rangefinders.

Thus with your product needs identified, RIOT can work with a wide range of hardware and base MCUs to form a complete product without “re-inventing the wheel”. If this is of interest, or you need guidance for any or all stages of product design – the first step is to discuss your needs with our team of experienced engineers that can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

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

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

The Pinoccio platform is based around the Pinoccio “Scout” board – a small, inexpensive microcontroller development board based on the Atmel ATmega256RFR2 microcontroller with built-in 802.15.4 2.4 GHz radio, aimed at quick and easy development of wireless, mesh-networked systems and projects without worrying about common challenges such as efficient battery power management, FCC certification and mesh networking protocols.

This hardware offers an integrated Web platform and API so you can easily get started talking to the Web with your project right out of the box, and a built-in lithium polymer battery on every board that is recharged via the same micro-USB port used for programming, with a battery runtime from days up to over a year depending on the software configuration and how the microcontroller and radio are used.

Pinoccio aims to provide an inexpensive but powerful, FCC-certified, power-efficient, mesh-networked and Internet-ready platform for easily accessible Arduino-style development, wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things experimentation.

A network of Pinoccio nodes are connected together via a lightweight 802.15.4 mesh network, using the 802.15.4 radio incorporated in every board to network with any other board that shares its Personal Area Network (PAN) ID.

At one or more nodes in the network, the Pinoccio node is equipped with a Pinoccio Wi-Fi board, based on the Gainspan GS1011MEPS 802.11 WiFi module, that connects the 802.15.4 mesh network to your wireless LAN. This means that every Pinoccio node is connected to the LAN and to the Internet, but with a substantially cost and substantially lower power consumption than would be needed if every node in the network was equipped with an 802.11 wireless LAN chipset.

The ATmega256RFR2 draws less than 20mA of current with its microcontroller and RF transmitter running during active transmission – about 10% of the current consumption of a typical Wi-Fi device. The ATmega256RFR2 can be put into sleep states with far lower power consumption as well, with “wake-on-radio” capability to wake up the microcontroller when the wireless network indicates.

With a WiFi connection on at least one node, every Pinoccio board in the mesh network is connected to the Internet. Routing between nodes is supported, so if board A and board C are out of reach of each other, but they can both reach a board B, then B will route packets for A and C to reach each other.

Even if one of the Scouts is out of WiFi range, the others will route its data up to the Web. Pinoccio uses a lightweight mesh networking stack by default – not ZigBee, for example, although there is no reason why advanced users can’t deploy a ZigBee stack on the Pinoccio hardware if they wish.

This coordinator-less mesh network stack is a lightweight alternative to coordinator-based network architectures. Several network configurations are possible, including the traditional coordinator/router/end-node, as well as a completely decentralised peer-to-peer mesh network with routing.

All Pinoccio Scout nodes can be programmed wirelessly, over the air, in a way that is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE – each node in the 802.15.4 network simply appears, with the Pinoccio networking software installed, as a virtual Arduino-compatible serial port in the Arduino IDE.

Without WiFi connectivity, however, users do still have the option of programming each board directly from a PC, via the USB port, just like any Arduino-compatible device, and more advanced users can talk to the chip via traditional hardware interfaces like ISP and JTAG.

You can have your Pinoccio boards scattered all over an area on a wireless mesh network, each doing their thing, and when you need to update the code on one, some, or all of them you can just do so wirelessly from your computer.

If you have Pinoccio boards within an installation, which are difficult to get to, you can easily update their software over-the-air, post-installation, offering a level of convenience that is hard to achieve with other microcontroller development platforms.

You can update a range of boards by listing several of them, or send an update to all boards in the network at once, sending out a single update broadcast. A single update could be sent out to 100 Pinoccio boards if they all need to be updated, and they would all receive the broadcast and update themselves.

The real value of the Pinoccio platform doesn’t just come from the Pinoccio Scout boards, but from the entire stack – from the physical hardware to the API and Web service and back. This includes features like over-the-air firmware updates, optimised mesh networking and the ability to easily move data between multiple Pinoccio boards across the mesh network, to the Web and back again.

Along with easy routing, discovery and beaconing, provisioning a new Pinoccio WiFi bridge node to the larger Web, and the use of low-bandwidth-friendly protocols like MQTT, Pinoccio is a platform that provides a high level of openness and interoperability.

Pinoccio is aimed at being very easy to use, power efficient, Arduino compatible, and completely open source, providing a complete end-to-end ecosystem for building the Internet-of-Things, but with open standards and without proprietary lock-in.

The Pinoccio API completes the last mile between your network of Pinoccio hardware and the Web, allowing you to send and receive messages between your board and the API. However, using the Pinoccio API is totally optional – you own your data, and you can run your own web server to talk to your Pinoccio devices if you wish. Every Pinoccio board can have its own REST-based URL, and it can respond to HTTP POST and GET requests, with the 802.15.4 mesh network and the WiFi bridge doing all the routing for you.

Pinoccio aims to support websockets and webhooks, allowing easy connectivity with Web services, and saves and logs all the data pushed to the API from your devices.

Unlike some other options on the market such as Electric Imp, Pinoccio offers a pre-baked end-to-end platform and Web service with a tightly integrated web-hardware experience to allow everybody to easily, quickly get up and running with a network of devices talking to a Web service – without locking you in and forcing you to only use their servers and Web services with their hardware.

The Pinoccio Scout is open-source hardware – you can download the hardware schematics, board layout and bootloaders freely. Pinoccio strives to use open, industry-standard protocols that are standardised by groups such as IETF and OASIS where possible.

Pinoccio currently uses MQTT as the core messaging protocol for the Pinoccio API on top of Atmel’s Lightweight Mesh Protocol and the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and radio physical layer, and is considering moving towards 6LoWPAN and RPL in future once these standards are more mature and more work is done in this area in the IETF working group.

One vision of future work that the Pinoccio team has is to have each board accessible from the Internet with a unique IP address, using IPv6/6LoWPAN and a WiFi bridge at one node. Shying away from non-standard protocols, Pinoccio supports HTTP and MQTT-S (MQTT for Sensor Networks) out of the box – but, again, without locking you into any particular choices, if you’re willing to put a bit of work in yourself to implement other protocols.

Pinoccio has good security capability available in every part of the network stack, which is attractive for automation networks and Internet-of-Things applications. The ATmega256RFR2 microcontroller has hardware-based AES128 encryption, along with a true hardware random number generator.

It’s simply a matter of defining a shared secret in your code to enable encryption for the entire mesh network. With the support for TLS sockets in the Pinoccio WiFi module, complete encryption is supported from the device to the Web.

Although still in the beta stage, the Pinoccio system holds great promise as an inexpensive and open mesh networking system which could be applied to new or existing IoT-enabled products.

If this is of interest, or you need guidance for any or all stages of product design – the first step is to discuss your needs with our team of experienced engineers that can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

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

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