Unalarming Discursions

Embedded Engineering Field Notes. Made by @jjmilburn.

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An Intro - IoT Hardware Platforms

24 Oct 2018

Selecting an interface to the physical world

For someone new to embedded IoT development, the growing selection of development platforms can be overwhelming. Here, we’ll explore some of the most popular hardware kits that let you easily build an interface to the real world.

If you’re new to embedded engineering, this post seeks to provide you with a better sense of ‘what matters’ when exploring a new development platform. Hopefully, you walk away with a few tools to help filter through the vast selection of hardware available to anyone starting a connected device project in 2018. While some of the platforms discussed fall solidly outside of the typical ‘embedded’ definition (The Raspberry Pi, for instance, is in no way a Class 0/1/2 resource constrained node), they’re worth including to compare the tradeoffs between a more ‘full featured’ platform and a typical ‘embedded’ processor.

IoT Hardware Platforms

When performing a ‘real-world’ downselection process, there’s typically a detailed comparison of the peripherals and features of each chip, including questions like:

Then, the answers to these questions map back to project requirements - if three separate high-resolution timers need to be running simultaneously, that rules out a few otherwise solid options, for example.

However, its useful to filter with less specific criteria at first, to quickly eliminate any solutions that won’t work for a more fundamental reason (e.g. you’re planning to run the system from AA batteries, but the hardware draws 50mA+ when in idle mode).

Here, we’ll make the following notes about each platform, intended to answer some high level questions that could make or break a project:

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

If it possible to use a Raspberry Pi to build your device, even if its just an early ‘works-like’ prototype, consider doing so. The development environment is familar to most (runs Linux), and its fairly powerful - image classification tasks are well within its capabilities. to plug-and-play (for the most part) USB devices gives some great peripheral flexibility. Built in Wifi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth give you solid options for connectivity out of the box.

In this performance class, also take a look at the Beaglebone PocketBeagle, billed as a “$25 Dollar Linux Computer”.

Hardware cost, power consumption, or the need for realtime processing would be sensible reasons to move from Pi to a different platform.

Note: For easy cellular connectivity ‘out of the box’ with a Raspberry Pi, consider the Hologram Nova. It has 2G, 3G, LTE-M, and NB-IoT options, providing cellular connectivity to a device anywhere as long as coverage exists. Hologram provides everything necessary to get connected, including the SIM card.

Arduino Mkr Wifi 1010

A household name in the maker community, Arduino has a large community of active users, providing a large variety of libraries and examples to build new projects upon. The inclusion of a WiFi module and battery-charging circuit reduce parts count when using the device in a battery powered (or intermittently powered) installation.

Besides the built-in WiFi chip, an interesting feature of the Mkr Wifi 1010 is the inclusion of the ECC508 “CryptoAuthenticator” chip. This line of chips deserves its own post, but it handles Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman key exchange onboard, a key component of modern asymmetric cryptography in connected systems. I’m (pleasantly) surprised to see them on entry-level development kits, as my past experience has been limited to evaluating them for ‘production scale’ security-sensitive projects. Here, it appears to be used for WiFi security, and might not be accessible for user application code.

Note: If you’re looking for WiFi connectivity in a slightly more barebones package, consider a standalone ESP8266. This is a basic system-on-chip which can run a simple program on the same chip that provides WiFi connectivity, in a relatively small package.

Particle Mesh - Argon

Particle makes not only the hardware, but supplies a ‘whole package’ IoT solution, including a backend platform with Developer Tools. If you’re going to deploy a fleet of devices that need to be remotely monitored and updated, having a drop-in solution can save significant development time.

I’ve highlighted the Particle Mesh solution in particular as a great example of the 802.15.4 networking capability of the Nordic nRF52840 chip which it is built around. Each mesh is expected to support at least 10-20 devices, giving plenty of room for expansion. If you’re looking to build a mesh of locally connected devices, and want to focus on the application rather than the mesh, this is worth a look.

STM Evaluation Boards

STMicroelectronics makes a fairly popular line of Cortex-M based 32-bit microcontrollers, which are included here as a well-supported, ‘bare metal’ option. Unlike a platform like Particle, you won’t get a fully featured ‘IoT solution’ out of the box. Low power consumption, a reliable supply chain (and cost that scales well with quantity), and good support from ST are solid benefits, however.

The speed of writing code that interacts directly with the registers on the MCU also means that interrupt latencies will be far lower than the options mentioned above.

Bonus - MicroPython

Not a hardware platform, but an interesting project seeking to make Python usable on lower-end hardware. The reference platform is a Cortex M4, which puts it in the same category as the the Particle Mesh Argon mentioned earlier. Response time can be under 10 microseconds, which is worse than possible with a bare-metal board (like an STMicroelectronics MCU), but far better than a Raspberry Pi.

Also worth mentioning in the ‘Not-C’ embedded languages category:

Backend Platforms

The basic concepts behind an IoT platform are easy to conceive. Simply send data from the device to a server, toss it in a database, and you’re done. But, for a scalable deployment, you’ll need to worry about security (both for data at rest, and during transmission between the server and the devices), authenticating devices (how do you prevent someone from cloning a device, and gaining write access to your backend?), providing device diagnostics, and pushing firmware updates to your fleet of devices.

If you are evaluating a backend to log data from (and push commands to) one or more connected devices, consider the following:

Great “Getting Started in Embedded” Resources

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