This is the fourth and final blog in a series on the ARM® Wall of Boards at Embedded World 2016.
Today we’ll cover the boards representing some exciting emerging trends in the electronics and embedded domain. The first of these is an extremely intriguing research project from the University of Michigan. The Michigan Micro Mote is billed as the world’s smallest self-contained computer system. It includes sensors, connectivity, processing, battery and even solar panels to charge the battery – all in a package smaller than half a centimeter. This is a phenomenal achievement, the closest thing to ‘smart dust’ I’ve seen since the term was coined. Perhaps not strictly a ‘board’, but worth a spot on our Wall none-the-less!
The next two trends I want to talk about are better explained by our in-house hacker, tinkerer and maker extraordinaire, Mark Woods(woodsy).
Eric: We’re seeing single board computers, running full featured operating systems, at $20, $15… even $5 now. What made this possible?
Mark: The economies of scale of the mobile computing revolution has resulted in incredibly integrated, high-performance, low power SoCs. It’s past-generations of these devices that are becoming available for general purpose compute platforms. For instance we see Samsung’s Exynos SoCs being used by Hardkernel’s Ordroid, Allwinner SoCs being used by Pine64, and many similar.
But it’s not just the CPU and memory system that’s important to new developers; the same revolution has ensured that we have low cost WiFi, BLE, MEMs (sensors), and plenty other components, all with a great focus on integration and low power.
These low cost boards are then innovating even further, able to leverage the ecosystem around the mobile SoCs, and offer board-level integration, often with pre-certified radios.
Eric: How did this change things for the Maker movement?
Mark: Makers (or DIYers for us Brits!) have always been pushing the boundaries, and have long been ardent users of MCUs.
As more complex SoCs have made their way to low cost platforms, they have seen rapid adoption. Examples are 3D printers built on Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone – enabling low cost system development and requiring only custom electronics for the machine control or UI specifics. Another great example is the OpenROV community – a community of developers creating personal underwater robots – and again starting with Beaglebone and Arduino.
Low cost and high performance have been critical, alongside the ability to code in high level languages such as Java or Python – I see these attributes echoed in other successful communities.
What’s important here is that makers with no formal Electrical Engineering skills can develop complex systems without having to worry about the costs, time and complexity of building and debugging complex hardware just to get to the system creation starting line. Of course, makers typically share, so the whole community benefits from open source software and sharing of builds and techniques.
It’s not all philanthropic of course – many open source 3D printers, CNC machines, robots and more have come from successful companies that live alongside the open source community that they both feed into and from.
Eric: Has this spilled over into industry?
Mark: The maker movement and these low cost compute boards have spilled into industry and vice versa.
Industrial users have adopted these low cost boards - I think the fact that we saw the Raspberry Pi compute module created with its embedding-friendly form factor is testament to the fact that they are convinced of the longevity of the technology and the companies behind it. Pi now offer a customization service (through Farnell), so if you have a decent volume, you can tailor the board and I/O to your needs. There are many other examples – one of my current favorites is the Krtkl Snickerdoodle – a $55 ARM Cortex®-A9 Zynq based FPGA board that will surely be used in machine control, robotics and professional drones. Exactly the same is happening with NVIDIA Jetson board and Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ – incredibly high performance compute boards being adopted into professional robotics and control – lighter, less power and much cheaper than traditional approaches.
In the other direction, I think industry has finally woken up to the fact that the makers, innovators and startups that gravitate to these innovative platforms are themselves a new market, with new needs. We’re seeing industry giants like Autodesk and Altium offer powerful CAD tools for non-commercial use, with incredible industrial design potential for new products. What once would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to begin prototyping can now be started for no upfront cost. Coupled with excellent CAM and innovative rapid prototyping technologies, the hardware barriers are coming crashing down. These phenomena are truly democratizing innovation.
Eric: Finally, can you share your thoughts on the Kickstarter phenomena?
Mark: I’m not the first to say that the availability of amazing technology as just discussed, at low power and cost has democratized technology, but in a similar way, Kickstarter and other crowd funding websites have democratized the opportunity to trial products and markets at vastly reduced risk.
Prior to Kickstarter, typical options open to startups would be – friends and family, credit cards (the only thing banks will bet is your risk), Angels or seed funds. Realistically, beyond boot strapping a prototype, hardware startups require vast amounts of cash to progress - and well in advance of making a first sale. This is all very risky. It’s no wonder we have previously seen such massive interest in software-based startups that can literally pivot on a dime, and don’t need expensive tools and test equipment.
Kickstarter has leveled the field by enabling ideas to find customers before the risky production cash flows. Let’s also realize that most product ideas can’t scale, and aren’t genuinely scalable startups - so would never attract seed or even angel backing. This is where Kickstarter has revolutionized access and opportunity.
You’ve likely heard of Pebble - the team that failed to get traditional startup funding, so came to the Kickstarter community for $100k and famously raised $10m to kick-start (pun intended) the smart watch phenomenon. Glowforge is an even bigger success story – literally. This was the biggest crowd funding campaign to date, raising $28m in 30 days, to create a very affordable laser cutter. Dan Shapiro (the Glowforge CEO) has written a book called ‘Hot Seat’ which I highly recommend!
I’d like to thank Mark for a really insightful set of answers. Finally, a listing of the boards I’ve grouped into this category – they represent successful maker communities, Kickstarter projects and of course that fascinatingly diminutive Michigan Micro Mote. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series!
DragonBoard 410c
Hikey Board
Odroid-XU4
Ordroid-C1+
Beaglebone Black
Raspberry Pi 2
Raspberry Pi Zero
Pine64
C.H.I.P.
Mbientlab Metawear C
Arduino/Genuino Zero
Arduino/Genuino Due
MSP-EXP432P401R Launchpad
Michigan Micro Mote