As presented in Bee Hayes-Thakore blog here, and in my preview blog here, the mbed Zone is one of the central pieces of this year's Techcon.
The first thing when walking around the showroom, is seeing how big the zone is! Where to start?! Here is a non-exhaustive sample of what I saw in the mbed Zone area.
I must admit that I get pulled straight away towards the IBM (International Business Machines) pod. I am curious - I see a few people whacking a dummy with a baseball bat. Seems like fun ! The demo is showcasing an example of monitoring safety on a building site, with a range of sensors on the workers safety helmet. Sensors, powered by mbed, can measure impacts, sounds, pressure etc..communicating via a long range wireless connection, and load all the way to the IBM foundation cloud the resulting information, for a real time safety status of the workers on the building site. To show this, indeed, what better way to swing full blast the baseball bat on the dummy’s head!
Moving on to the Zebra stand, I see a showing of different boards, all using mbed 3.0 with mbed Device Server, communicating to the Zatar IoT cloud platform. You want to get started on your IoT application? it is quite simple, you select the board you are using, and you just point it at Zatar, and there you go!
I am next attracted to the Silicon Labs pod, where I see someone wearing a dev platform on his wrist. This is Silicon Labs derivative of the mbed wearable reference design, which has a all the functionalities you’d think of a wearable nowadays, including heart rate monitor. Of course, this is mbed OS running on it! It will be on sale soon, for around $75.
Silicon Labs also show a Thread demo, with a mobile app controlling 20 lights via an mbed TLS connection to the web.
Right beside Silicon Labs, you can see a fun demo game of rolling dice by uBlox. The ublox platform is small enough to be able to fit in a dice. When you throw the 5 dices, the acceleration sensors detects the position of the dice, send that information via a Bluetooth LE connection, to the ublox ARM mbed powered gateway, and send the information to the IBM bluemix cloud. And you can see the results on the screen. I am wondering when this will be used in Las Vegas.
Moving on, I see the wot.io pod being very busy, as it is an ARM TechCon Innovation Challenge IoT product finalist. Wot.io were presenting their Ship IoT with ARM mbed product.
which enables connecting data from ARM mbed supported devices with a wide selection of data services.
On the Microchip pod, there is an home automation example. Running on an SAMR21 platform, with mbed OS 3.0 and Thread connectivity, it controls a mesh network of lights, and motion control, say, for a door garage. The end device relays light sensor information to parent, which controls the networked lights.
Continuing my tour, I see a couple of gentlemen heavily engaged in a 2015 version game of rock/paper/scissors on the Freescale pod. Using an FRDM-K64F board (The FRDM-K64F is an mbed platform for IBM Bluemix and Microsoft Azure cloud platform), two players use the mbed OS powered FRDM-K64F and FRDM-CR20A 802.15.4 wireless boards to play.
After several ties, there is a winner: the scissors win !
On the STMicroelectronics booth, there is a demo of one the several ST Nucleo and ST Discovery platforms which are supported on mbed, completed with ST connectivity, motion and environmental boards.
This is just a sample of what I saw on the mbed Zone, and it is impressive to see the various ways each partners
is using mbed technology. But that's not all. When I left the mbed Zone to find a place to write this blog,
I saw the wall of ARM mbed enabled boards. It seems I am not the only one impressed by the wide choice,
and stopping to reflect on it.
Make sure you visit ARMFlix for more videos on mbed and TechCon, and mbed.com for more news about mbed.