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Redpine Gives Makers a “Future-Proof” IoT Platform

Internet of Things (IoT) platforms have been a thing since we started talking about the IoT way back with our coverage of Ayla Networks. The idea is to provide all the pieces necessary for assembling an IoT application.

Problem is, “platform” is an incredibly overloaded term. In our context, it can mean an offering that includes everything you need, or it can mean a framework for interconnecting pieces (pieces not necessarily included). It may even refer only to a portion of … Read More → "Redpine Gives Makers a “Future-Proof” IoT Platform"

We are doomed

I’ve written before on Future Horizon’s regular reviews of the state of the semiconductor industry. (The four horsemen). Malcolm Penn, the firm’s founder and CEO, is normally fairly up-beat, but yesterday he was wearing black. Given the state of the world economy he sees the market for semiconductor sales as essentially flat in dollars.  Given that unit shipments are maintaining their 29 years of 10% annual growth, the average selling price (ASP) is falling, again another long term trend. The result is that chip companies are going … Read More → "We are doomed"

Bashing Bugs on SoCs

UltraSoC, the SOC debug company I wrote about a few weeks ago www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20150728-ultrasoc/ is being pretty imaginative in their marketing. Today, they have launched a new whitepaper,  Performance  Monitoring  Using  UltraSoC by drawing attention to Apple’s delay in launching watchOS 2. All that is generally known is that the delay was caused “by a bug” which most news channels have assumed was purely a software issue. UltraSoc is speculating that it might have been something within the SoC … Read More → "Bashing Bugs on SoCs"

Single-Radio Zigbee and Thread

Earlier this year we saw that Zigbee and Thread were collaborating to implement Zigbee profiles or “clusters,” which normally appear at the top of a Zigbee stack, over the Thread stack as well.

Strategically, this allows top-level Zigbee to handle IP-based data, since Thread includes 6LoWPAN, an IPv6 adaptation for running over 802.15.4, the radio protocol used by Zigbee. Much of the world operates with IP on layer 3; this allows Zigbee infrastructure to participate.

That’s at the top of … Read More → "Single-Radio Zigbee and Thread"

The Internet of Lightbulbs

iStock_000016897113_Small.jpgBased on a solution just announced by CSR (now part of Qualcomm), you can outfit your new building with lights – and your network will be in place.

OK, they’re not positioning it to replace your Ethernet plant, perhaps, but it could become part of the network. They do this by making each LED lightbulb fixture also a Bluetooth mesh node. In case you missed the Read More → "The Internet of Lightbulbs"

What’s in an IoT Name? And Who Goes First?

iStock_000051490138_Small.jpgAt Imec’s ITF a couple months ago, the Internet of Things (IoT) loomed large, as it has a tendency to do everywhere. Seems to be the great unifying force, the collective raison d’être for us all.

But they had a different spin: the “intuitive” internet of things. It seems that everyone is trying to carve out their own version of the IoT, which is easily done with … Read More → "What’s in an IoT Name? And Who Goes First?"

Blue-Collar Sensors from Microchip

In our coverage of sensors, we’ve seen increasing levels of abstraction as microcontrollers in or near the sensors handle the hard labor of extracting high-level information from low-level info. These are the hipster sensors that go on the wearables that go on your person for a month and then go on your nightstand.

Today, however, we’re going to get grittier and more obscure. Some sensors have more of a blue-collar feel to them, and I discussed two examples with Microchip back at Sensors Expo.

The first is a current sensor. Specifically, … Read More → "Blue-Collar Sensors from Microchip"

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