In the spirit of some of the more well-known ARM-based development boards and their popular communities, I was curious what other innovative ideas are out there being crowdsourced. Just a bit of research quickly revealed eight ARM-based embedded projects on Kickstarter, with a few incorporating some surprising functionality well beyond the everyday development board.
AshimaCore – FUNDED, June 1, 2013A flight control system on a module, AshimaCore packs the Caltech experience of its designers into a tiny board with a 168 MHz STMicro STM32F4xx microcontroller tied to an InvenSense MPU-9150 nine-axis MEMS motion tracking sensor. For wireless connections, Digi Xbee modules are used to support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, or logner range 900 MHz ISM. They are building on the open source AQ32Plus quadcopter flight software.
CoAction Hero – FUNDED, May 22, 2013
CoActionOS is an open source RTOS, and in CoAction Hero is running on a 120 MHz NXP LPC1759 MCU with 1MB of serial flash, a microUSB interface, and an expansion header. Stackable expansion modules include an LCD panel and a minimal Bluetooth interface. The software for the LCD panel is Qt based.
MatchboxARM – Open until September 6, 2013Going really small, MatchboxARM puts a 72MHz STMicro STM32F10 3 MCU and its peripherals on a DIP package which can be put into a standard breadboard, or powered from the miniUSB connector. This is one of many examples directly targeting Arduino-style boards with ARM architecture and open source C/C++ development environments like Coocox.
Parallela – FUNDED, October 27, 2012As the name suggests, Adepteva has gone after parallel computing with Parallela and their Epiphany architecture. Based on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 and all its capability, the board also features a 16 or 64 core Epiphany “multicore accelerator” chip, connecting very simple RISC cores (each at a remarkable 25mW) in a low latency mesh. It ships with Ubuntu OS, and an SDK for OpenCL programming.
Piksi – Open until September 5, 2013GPS is wonderful, but rather imprecise for some applications – accurate to only within a few meters. Real-time kinematic (RTK) techniques use carrier wave phase computations and a second receiver to improve accuracy to centimeters. Piksi is a compact 53x55mm GPS receiver implementing RTK, using a 168 MHz STM32F4xx MCU and a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA behind a Maxim MAX2769 down-converter. This combination computes position / velocity / time solutions at 50 Hz.
Red Pitaya – Open until September 20, 2013Another project based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000, Red Pitaya changes the whole idea behind instrumentation from a big box to a small board, open to many more users. The board features two channels of fast 125 MS/s analog inputs, and two similar channels of analog output, along with lower speed mixed signal I/O capability. Linux-based software implements an oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, waveform generator, and more.
Spark Core – FUNDED, June 1, 2013Adding Wi-Fi to embedded devices should be a lot easier. Spark Core delivers a 72 MHz STMicro STM32 MCU with a TI CC3300 Wi-Fi chip. The Spark API is a REST environment exposed through a cloud, so it can be updated over-the-air or via USB. It also dovetails into the Arduino environment, running Wiring, and there are several Shield add-ons.
Teensy 3.0 – FUNDED, September 16, 2012Back to the smaller end, Teensy 3.0 takes the low-cost prototyping family into ARM territory with a 48 MHz Freescale Kinetis K20 MCU. Available with header pins or solder pads, the 1.4 x 0.7 inch board features USB and the usual suite of on-chip digital and analog peripherals.
When boards like these grow up, they turn into more finished Kickstarter projects like the Agent smartwatch. Starting from STM32F4 prototype boards, SecretLabs teamed up with House of Horology to create a fully-featured device. In a bit of a surprise, they shunned the Pebble route and Android apps, going instead with .NET Micro Framework. They also incorporated Qi wireless charging and Bluetooth LE, along with motion and light sensors.
Seeing the sheer range of ideas and creative combinations of hardware and software in these examples is exciting. Combined with the more well-known platforms, this activity bodes well for the future of ARM in developing billions of embedded devices.
I found Agent interesting because of how the project evolved from embedded roots. It didn't start out as a watch form factor. Secret Labs produces a family of boards very similar to the other eight projects I mentioned, which formed the initial functional prototypes.