Tag Archives: iot

Internet of Squirrel?

  June 4, 2015 ,

So I was getting ready to write my next blog entry for the Magic Cooler, when….

DOUG-UP-SQUIRREL-600x300

Well, Esquilo! (squirrel in Portuguese) anyway!

The founders of Esquilo came to visit at work this week.  They have a Kickstarter going on for their Esquilo Air board, a wifi-enabled development board targeted specifically to enable simple IoT (internet of things) setups to the Maker Community!

Freescale purchased some of the boards BEFORE the Kickstarter has ended and handed out to those intrepid folks willing to make it into something.

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Pre-Kickstarter is cool.

 

What is the Esquilo board you ask?  Here  it is:

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Internet of Squirrel?

 

 

The “Air” board has Arduino-compatible pin headers, a micro SD card slot, and an awesome K64F FSL Kinetis micro with 1MB of flash! (not biased or anything).

Most importantly the board has built-in Wifi whose drivers have already been loaded on there.  Everything is built-in on this board!  Including the IDE!  Plus it uses the Squirrel language, which is dynamic, so no compiling and loading!!

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That’s right.  From what I understand while not having yet played with it– is that the board having built-in Wifi capability lets you connect to it via your computer browser, like you would any router or access point.   Then you write your code or load it in there.     Then run it.   No internet required.  No USB required (unless you want for power).   You can load code via the on-board micro-SD slot.

Very excited to see how this will work out and have many ideas for how I want to use it.

Stay tuned!!!

 

 

Head of a Pin

  January 25, 2015

Ok, this really is a nanowonder!  Admittedly, this chip came out by Freescale last year but I just received it in a business card like format:

Did you miss it?  That’s the MCU (microcontroller unit) there in the little window set into the card next to the lifesize image of a pushpin.

Screenshot 2015-01-24 at 11

“I love it when we put things on the head of a pin!”

The KL03 (as of last 10 months), claims to be the smallest ARM-powered MCU at an uber-tiny size of 2mm x 1.61mm!  Most importantly the height of the chip is only 0.56mm, making it very easy to come up with all kinds of applications!

The form factor is WLCSP (Wafer Level Chip Scale Package) which instead of using pins uses tiny solder balls that you heat up as you drop the chip onto a board:

With such a tiny device you might wonder what can you really do with it?  First off with only 20 pins I took a look at the pinout diagram to see what exactly I could access:

Besides VDD and VSS (power and ground), it appears you can access 11 pins of Port A (PTA0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,12) and 7 of Port B (PTB0,1,2,3,4,5,13).  These of course are multiplexed to permit access to I2C, GPIO and UART interfaces as well as a 12-bit ADC.  What is most impressive is that there is an ARM Cortex M0+ core inside that can go up to 48MHz and the device is self-booting (has its own boot ROM)!

The application for this little guy is the so-called “Internet of Things,” or IoT.  Since it is very small it consumes very little power at 50uA/MHz.  You set the clock as high as your application may require but not too high to minimize power consumption.

I have no idea yet what applications are using the KL03, but I would imagine things like having them implanted in small, wearable devices or inside smart light bulbs, light switches, etc.  I’ll let you know here as soon as I see one “in the wild.”

Here’s the official page:  http://www.freescale.com/kinetis/kl03csp

Wonder what’s coming next?  I hear Freescale may be wanting to go even smaller…

Hanging out with Abe on the back of the $5 bill!

(Disclaimer, yes I work for Freescale– but not for marketing or applications– but here can’t help but be wowed.)