If you’re electronically-inclined, you gotta love the Maker Movement. The spiritual descendants of generations of home hobbyists, tinkerers, and shade-tree mechanics, Makers are taking full advantage of the Internet of Things and its emphasis on cheap edge-node processing to put together complex projects that rely heavily on low-cost development kits.
Incidentally, I first dipped my toe into the 70’s era Maker movement when I was a senior in college: in 1979, I attempted to build a weather satellite ground station from a design in the November and December 1974 editions of Wireless World magazine.
The author claimed that with a basic electronics workshop and an oscilloscope the circuit was suitable for “school and university groups who might wish to…. operate a compact weather satellite ground station.” He obviously had never encountered someone of my ineptitude: my version was a complete failure. Amazing they let me graduate, really.
We now return to your regular programming. Recognizing an opportunity when they see one, suppliers to the professional engineering market are scrambling to raise their Maker profiles and introduce low-cost developments kits aimed at that market.
Intel and Avnet were the top sponsors at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo: other distributors or manufacturers of electronic components included Digi-Key, Arduino, Mouser, Nvidia, and STMicroelectronics. Many projects make use of cognitive IoT platforms in the cloud: IBM, Google, and Microsoft also kicked in some corporate support.
How has the Maker movement affected the price of development boards? Many Makers are individual enthusiasts spending their own money; development boards and kits from Raspberry Pi and Arduino, the two platforms with the longest pedigree, are available from major distributors starting at under $30.
The Raspberry Pi single-board computer was originally developed to teach basic computer science in UK schools. The latest Raspberry Pi 3 is based around a 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU running at 1.2GHz. It includes an 802.11n Wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.1, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Other features include 1GB RAM, a micro SD card slot, 4 USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet ports, a camera interface, 40 GPIO pins, plus other specialized interfaces.
The Arduino open-source development platform began in Italy in 2003. The popular Arduino UNO uses the Microchip (formerly Atmel) ATmega328P 8-bit RISC microcontroller; the newer Arduino Due upgrades the core to a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3. A range of boards is available: even the base models include digital and analog i/o, and higher-end units offer features such as Bluetooth, 101/00 Ethernet, or WiFi (802.11 b/g/n).
On the software side, the Maker movement is intertwined with the open-source movement and relies heavily on free software tools and integrated development environments (IDEs) running under Linux or Android.
The major distributors offer a choice of development kits for each platform, with the software freely available from the manufacturers or sources such as the GitHub open-source repository. There are also expansion boards that cover dozens of common requirements, so other manufacturers commonly include Arduino or Raspberry Pi expansion capability in their development boards.
Budget boards tend to have a minimum feature set and require plug-in expansion boards for many application-specific functions. For the most part, traditional microcontroller suppliers have chosen to offer more feature-rich boards at higher price points.
Edison is Intel’s development platform for both Makers and product designers. It’s based on a 22-nm system-on-chip (SoC) device that includes two Intel processors: a dual-core, dual-threaded Atom CPU running at 500 MHz, plus a 32-bit Quark microcontroller running at 100 MHz.
The VL-62851 Creator Ci20 from UK-based Imagination Technologies is a single-board computer that supports Linux and Android. The board has a dual-core 1.2GHz MIPS32 CPU paired with the company’s own PowerVR SGX540 GPU and supports Raspberry Pi expansion boards. Wireless connectivity options include 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, 10/100 Ethernet, HDMI, and USB.
The Creator Ci20, available from Mouser, comes preloaded with Debian 7, a Linux distribution, upgradeable to Debian 8; it also supports other popular Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Yocto, or you can choose Android Lollipop version 5.0.
What if you’re a Windows guru looking to leverage your existing experience? The LattePanda controller board comes with an installed and activated full edition of Windows 10. The CPU is Intel’s Cherry Trail Z8300 Quad Core running at 1.8GHz, together with Microchip’s 8-bit ATmega32u4: that’s used as a co-processor to give Arduino compatibility. The LattePanda comes with multiple connectivity options such as USB 3.0, WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0.
That’s not the only game in town: Microsoft and Adafruit have collaborated to develop a port of Windows IoT Core for the Raspberry Pi 3.
As you might expect, this level of cheap processing power has given rise some sophisticated projects, many developed by professional engineers moonlighting as Makers.
Asad Zia, who’s an embedded system engineer at Siemens by day and a self-taught machine vision guru by night, put together the system in Figure 1 that distinguishes between different emotions. The project combines a webcam, the Imagination Creator Ci20 board and a range of free cloud-based tools from Microsoft Cognitive Services that perform face recognition, linguistic analysis and more.
Apparently, that was too easy: Asad’s latest project teaches a robot to track – and catch, in future iterations – a bouncing tennis ball. This design uses the open-source OpenVX vision acceleration program running on the Nvidia Jetson TX1 development kit (Figure 3).
Nvidia, of course, is all over the video gamer market and a dominant player in supercomputer graphics processing units (GPUs). The Jetson TX1 (wonder where they got that name?) board boasts Nvidia’s Maxwell GPU with 256 cores, quad 64-bit ARM A57/2 CPUs, gigabit Ethernet, under 10W power consumption, and a peak performance of one Teraflop/s (Tfps), or 1012 floating-point operations per second. The development kit is available on Amazon for $579 – why not get it gift-wrapped?
Seeing my fellow engineers developing these jaw-dropping projects in their spare time makes me realize that I need to raise my game. I can do so much more than rewire a plug or change a guitar pickup. I must rise above my failure of 1979.
Accordingly, I shall add potentiometers to my stretch goals for 2018.
Or maybe 2019.