EW: Dev kits tackle IoT diversity

Development kits for IoT node designs seem to be everywhere at Embedded World in Nuremberg this week.

ON Semiconductor has tackled the problem of designing in the various wireless interfaces by using daughter boards which interface to the Wi-Fi enabled baseboard.

In this way it will support a range of IoT wireless interfaces such as: SIGFOX, Thread, EnOcean, Wireless Mbus, Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, PoE and CAN.

And of course the daughter board configuration can be used to connect sensors (temperature, moisture, ambient light, proximity and pressure, along with heart rate monitoring and bio sensor interfaces) and actuators (with stepper and brushless motor driving, plus the ability to drive LED strings) to the system.

The baseboard itself is based its IoT design around the NCS36 510 system-on-chip (SoC), which has an ARM Cortex-M3 core, running the ARM mbed OS.

An Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) that includes a C++ compiler, debugger and code editor.

And if its the Thread wireless interface you want to use for your IoT node, then Nordic Semiconductor’s software design kit for its nRF52840 IEEE 802.15.4 PHY chip may be the one for you.

There is a pre-built OpenThread stack for the chip; examples of different Thread roles; support for an OpenThread network co-processor; a CoAP application layer example; border router and cloud connectivity example; and a range of PC tools including a Thread topology monitor.

Another low power WAN technology on show at Embedded World this week is the Weightless-P interface.

Ubiik has a design kit that includes the hardware required to deploy, demonstrate, evaluate and develop Weightless-P IoT networks.

Renesas Electronics has its Synergy platform on show in Nuremberg and now this can be used with the Amazon Web Service (AWS).

An IoT device SDK for the Synergy platform includes a binary executable to demonstrate functionality, full AWS IoT Device and project source code, plus detailed tutorials for creating and configuring the IoT device, building messages and requests, and creating an IoT Device Shadow.

The kit was developed for Renesas by RELOC. And it makes use of AWS cloud-specific protocols from the Express Logic X-Ware IoT product suite. The X-Ware IoT Platform incorporates a safety certified TCP/IP protocol (SIL 4 and ASIL-D).

The AWS IoT Device SDK is designed to run on the Synergy Starter Kit SK-S7G2.