Lots of activity around radio embedded systems (Internet of things)

We all know that Internet of things is going to be the next revolution and it’s on the way, we also know that this revolution will not come from some main existing IT leaders as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon … ( I won’t say Google, because they are good player here) but from a lot of non existent companies/startups. It’s really interesting to see what is happening on crowd founding place like kickstarter (Ok, Amazon is part of it) these days : for sure we can see Internet of things in creation with a lots of connected gadget founded. But you can also found all the raw material used by the future companies to make this revolution real.

A year ago we had a lot of buzz around Raspberry PI ( and it continue to grow even if I think the reality of this environment is under its promise ) which is an interesting platform like BeagleBoard Black coming this month is. In my opinion these platforms are good to do geeky stuff but suffer of two issues : not natively wireless and consuming too much power. I assume Internet of thinks is mostly mobile and wireless : because I won’t put many cables in my house to connect these objects : I want wifi/battery stuff!

So, by reviewing Kickstarter, you have a good overview and what is coming soon and it is interesting to discover multiple embedded systems, ready to be battery & wireless proof:

We have for example RFduino able to communicated using bluetooth and be powered by coin or AAA batteries, coming next month and based on Arduino. Very interesting platform to build small and autonomous system connected to a smart-phone. Price is around $20 for the system.

We also have Spark Core able to communicate using wifi. This platform is also based on Arduino and is sold about $35. It is a really tiny system, easy to hack with a standard dip package format.

Adding to that we can found radio module for Arduino plaform. Most of the objects created on such technologies are sold from $99 to $279 like this one : the memoto lifelogging camera which is a really, really compact object including battery, camera, GPS system all in one.

As a brief conclusion of this article the wave is coming soon based on these basic elements, Arduino seems to be the big player in the arena and the crowd founding the best system to start playing and sourcing.

 

 

2 thoughts on “Lots of activity around radio embedded systems (Internet of things)

  1. Je pense que, pour la plupart des usages, sans Wi-Fi, pas de salut! C’est tellement plus simple de remonter des informations sur un serveur avec cette connectivité. Je trouve donc vraiment bien cette petite Spark Core.

    J’ai regardé il y a quelques semaines le SmartConfig du Wi-Fi utilisé sur les chip CC3000 de TI et cela permet de configurer depuis zéro un device headless ce qui est un réél plus (http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/CC3000_Smart_Config et http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/CC3000_First_Time_Configuration).

    Je sens que je vais commander ce petit truc dès qu’il sort!

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