Embedded Systems

🎚 Bee S3 ultra-low-power ESP32-S3 board can last several years on a LiPo battery Smart Bee Designs’ Bee S3 is an ultra-low-power development board based on Espressif ESP32-S3 WiFi & Bluetooth microcontroller that consumes less than 20 uA in deep sleep mode allowing the board to theoretically last over 5 years under specific conditions. Bee S3 specifications: ▫️ Wireless module – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3-MINI-1 module with ESP32-S3 dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, 4MB or 8MB QSPI flash, PCB antenna ▫️ Expansion – 2x 10-pin headers with up to 15x GPIO, 8x ADC, touch support, I2C, SPI, UART, 5V In/out, 3.3V out, and GND ▫️ Misc – Reset and Boot buttons, RGB LED ▫️ Support for 1S LiPo battery through 2-pin JST connector with battery voltage monitoring Power consumption: ▫️ Deep sleep – < 20 uA ▫️ Wake, no WiFi – 40 mAh ▫️ Wi-Fi Connected, no traffic – 55+ mAh ▫️ Sending/receiving MQTT messages – 100 mAh #boards

📃 5 things to know about IoT protocols In 2022, “ease of use” and “reliability” top the list of most important protocol requirements. IoT Analytics surveyed 200 senior decision-makers on their IoT connectivity setup. Here are five takeaways, from the report, that paint a picture of the IoT protocol landscape in 2022: ▫️ There is no one-size-fits-all IoT protocol ▫️ Protocols purpose-made for IoT are seeing increased adoption ▫️ Software is becoming more important to managing IoT connectivity ▫️ “Ease of use” and “reliability” are most important when choosing a new protocol ▫️ Decision-making for IoT protocols has become a multi-stakeholder exercise The rise of IoT is bringing along radical changes in how devices communicate with each other, and IoT protocols will only increase in adoption and importance as the number of connected devices increases. The burden is on the adopters to plan well and decide on the most suitable IoT protocol to prevent an unwanted digital Babylon from happening. #articles #IoT

📃 Getting Started with LILYGO T-SIM7000G ESP32 (LTE, GPRS, and GPS) Get started with the ESP32 and the SIM7000G LTE/GPS/GPRS module. Throughout this tutorial, we’ll use the LILYGO T-SIM7000G ESP32 board that combines the ESP32 chip, the SIM7000G module, microSD card slot, battery holder, and charger on the same board. Besides Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, you can communicate with this ESP32 board using SMS. You can also connect it to the internet using your SIM card data plan and get GPS location. More information... #projects #esp32

📰 Arduino IDE 2.0 is now officially released! After 18 months of debugging of the Beta version, the Arduino IDE 2.0 is now officially released and is available for downloading. Some of the features: ▫️ There are some obvious changes in the user interface with quick access to your Sketchbook, boards, libraries, and live debugger on the left side, and auto-completion as shown above should speed up your code writing once you are used to it. ▫️ Code compilation time has become significantly faster. ▫️ The serial plotter that can display data outputted to the serial terminal. ▫️ The Arduino IDE 2.0 now supports dark mode. ▫️ The IDE can now update itself when a new version is available. More information... #news #arduino

📃 Guide to Modular Firmware This article is for embedded software developers with a solid working knowledge of C or C++, but who struggle with large and complex projects If you learn to develop embedded code, e.g. using the Arduino IDE, you find plenty of small example programs. It is helpful to get things started quickly, but as soon as your project begins to grow, help related to software design is rare. In contrast, when you learn software development for desktop applications, project structures and software design is an integral part of the learning process. In this short article, you will get a simple guide on how you can build a modular structure for your firmware. This will keep your code clean and maintainable for large and complex projects. More information... #articles #programming

📟 Ztachip open-source RISC-V AI accelerator performs up to 50 times faster Ztachip is an open-source RISC-V accelerator for vision and AI edge applications running on low-end FPGA devices or custom ASIC that is said to perform 20 to 50 times faster than on non-accelerated RISC-V implementations, and is also better than RISC-V cores with vector extensions (no numbers were provided here). Ztachip, pronounced zeta-chip, is not tied to a particular architecture, but the example code features a RISC-V core based on the VexRiscv implementation and can accelerate common computer vision tasks such as edge detection, optical flow, motion detection, color conversion, as well as TensorFlow AI models without retraining. The open-source AI accelerator has been tested on Digilent ArtyA7-100T FPGA board in combination with a PMOD VGA module to connect to a display and an OV7670 VGA camera module. The instructions needed could be found on Github. More information... #projects #fpga

📰 Companies Are Hacking Their Way Around the Chip Shortage The supply chain issues have no end in sight, so manufacturers are being forced to improvise As the global chip shortage stretches toward the two-year mark, manufacturers are pulling some unusual tricks to keep production lines moving. Carmakers are using semiconductors taken from washing machines, rewriting code to use less silicon, and even shipping their products without some chips while promising to add them in later. With the shortage of semiconductors now a new normal, everyone is being forced to adapt. The crisis is also creating new opportunities for some companies. For instance, Smith & Associates, an electronic components broker, has hired 300 staff since the pandemic began, on top of a staff of 500, to keep production lines running. More information... #news

🤖 OpenCat - open-source Arduino and Raspberry Pi-based quadruped robotic pet The goal of the project is to foster collaboration in quadruped (four-legged) robotic research, education, and engineering development of agile and affordable quadruped robot pets, bring STEM concepts to the mass and inspire newcomers to join the robotic AI revolution to create more applications. This project provides a base open-source platform to create amazing programmable gaits, locomotion, and deployment of inverse kinematics quadruped robots and bring simulations to the real world via C/C++/Python programming languages. More information... #projects #robots

🎬 How I hacked a hardware crypto wallet and recovered $2 million I was contacted to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million worth of cryptocurrency (in the form of THETA). Knowing that existing research was already out there for this device, it seemed like it would be a slam dunk. Little did I realize the project would turn into a roller coaster ride with over three months of experimentation, failures, successes, and heart-stopping moments. It reminded me that hacking is always unpredictable, exciting, and educational, no matter how long you've been doing it. In this case, the stakes were higher than normal: I only had one chance to get it right. https://youtu.be/dT9y-KQbqi4 #video #electronics #security

💻 Simple and Exponential Moving Averages in Embedded C++ Digital filtering is a handy tool for removing noise from an ADC signal. Digital filters come in two varieties: FIR and IIR. The simple moving average and the exponential moving average are two simple examples to let you get started. In this article, you will look at two types of low pass filters one having an FIR and the other an IIR. The article also provides a repository which contains a couple more filter types. If you learn about a few different filters (IIR high pass, Biquad), you can use this approach to have an excellent toolbox for manipulating all types of signals. More information: The main article The repository with code #articles #programming #cpp

🎚 EdgePro1 - tiny, open-source, 600-MHz, ARM-Cortex-M7 board with Wi-Fi & BLE connectivity and LuaJIT support EdgePro1 is all about power and simplicity. The board was designed to fit between low-level microcontroller boards (think Arduino style) and full fledged Linux capable Single-Board-Computers or SBCs. It is an IoT capable device with WiFi/BLE communication, some external storage (8 MB - mega bytes of it) and of course a security chip to protect sensitive data going in and out. Main CPU is NXP i. MX RT1064 with 600 MHz Cortex M7, 4 MB of XiP Flash and 1 MB of static RAM, which includes a 512 KB of Tightly-Coupled-Memory (TCM). Later is capable of running at CPU speeds without the use of cache memory. The U-Blox Nina W102 communication module has additional two Tensilica 240 MHz cores together with 520 KB of RAM and 2 MB of Flash. More information... #boards

📟 Guide: Designing a Smart watch using ESP32 Super detailed guide of designing a custom smart watch using popular microcontroller. People may access messages, alerts, health information, and other advanced information easily and quickly using smartwatches. While smartwatches are formally revolutionary as standalone devices, their capabilities essentially increase when used in conjunction with other devices that people carry, such as their smartphones or tablets. In this project, we are going to build a feature-rich, customizable smartwatch from scratch. We are going to make this using the best affordable and easily available components. Since designing such a product is a lengthy time-consuming procedure, we are going to do this in parts. More information: Part 1: Making Watch Faces Part 2: Ambient Light and Heart Rate Sensors Part 3: Magnetometer and Gyroscope #projects #esp32

📟 PCB Bench Vise From Aluminum Extrusion Profile A nice project of a useful tool for soldering the PCBs. The author supplied the 3D models of the parts that need to be printed so everybody could build one. More information... #projects

📰 Stanford engineers present new chip that ramps up AI computing efficiency AI-powered edge computing is already pervasive in our lives. Devices like drones, smart wearables, and industrial IoT sensors are equipped with AI-enabled chips so that computing can occur at the “edge” of the internet, where the data originates. This allows real-time processing and guarantees data privacy. However, AI functionalities on these tiny edge devices are limited by the energy provided by a battery. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is crucial. Stanford University engineers have come up with a potential solution: a novel resistive random-access memory (RRAM) chip that does the AI processing within the memory itself, thereby eliminating the separation between the compute and memory units. Their chip, called NeuRRAM, is about the size of a fingertip and does more work with limited battery power than what current chips can do. More information... #news #artificial_intelligence

📟 Open-Source Fast Linear Actuator in one PCB A fully integrated PCB linear actuator, with the motor driver, encoder and motor all on a single PCB. There are many ways to make a linear actuator, a device for moving something is a straight line. Most of the easier to make ones use a conventional motor and a mechanical linkage such as a rack and pinion or a lead screw, but author has gone for something far more elegant. His linear actuator uses a linear motor, a linear array of coils for the motor phases, working against a line of magnets. Even better than that, he’s managed to make the whole motor out of a single PCB. And it’s fast! More information: The main article Software page Hardware page #projects

📃 C++ Templates for Embedded Code Templates are a powerful feature of the C++ language but their syntax can be complex. This causes some developers to not use them, while others are concerned that templates might cause bloat to the compiled code. The author explains how templates work and how you may use them in your code. Although the examples provided are for the Arduino Uno and Adafruit Feather M0, the concepts will work with any platform and with all modern C++ compilers. More information: Part 1: basics and function templates Part 2: template classes and specialisation #articles #programming #cpp

📚 Embedded Control for Mobile Robotic Applications (2022) The book includes coverage of a variety of embedded platforms, their use in controller implementation, stability analyses of designed controllers, and two new approaches for designing embedded controllers. The authors offer a full chapter on Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA) architecture development for controller design that is perfect for both practitioners and students taking robotics courses and provide a companion website that includes MATLAB codes for simulation and embedded platform-specific code for mobile robotic applications (in Embedded C and Verilog). The book also offers: ▫️ A thorough introduction to embedded control, including processor, IC, and design technology, as well as a discussion of limitations in embedded control design ▫️ Practical discussions of generic FPGA architecture design ▫️ In-depth examinations of discrete-time controller design Download the book (.pdf, 8 MB) #books #control

📰 Fearing lawsuits, factories rush to replace humans with robots in South Korea In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison. Experts and local media say that the law has shaken the heavy industry and construction sectors. Along with pushing the companies to invest to make workplaces safer, they point out, it’s triggered a ramp-up of automation in order to require fewer workers — or, ideally, none at all. “Companies are moving to reduce human labor,” Jung Jin-woo, a Seoul National University of Science & Technology professor who studies occupational safety and has been following businesses’ reaction to the law, told Rest of World. “There’s also hesitation to jump into any high-risk projects.” More information... #news #robots

📟 Open-Source Micro Breadboard Power Supply A small, Micro USB connected power supply designed to fit onto the power rails of a solderless breadboard. For each side, you can select between 3.3 & 5.0 Volt linear regulators, or the input voltage at the screw terminal. The integrated version adds 26 breadboard rows and 2 continuous power rails. So you can turn those prototypes into something more permanent with an easy microUSB power connector. More information... #projects #electronics