Modern design techniques
allow engineers to focus
on their unique value add,
rather than having to reinvent the
wheel for every new invention. Yet it’s
widely accepted that nearly 75% of
Internet of Things (IoT) projects fail.
Not because of an overly stretched
design engineer or flawed design, but
because of the business case, or lack
of one. With all the tools available
it’s easy to get IoT-connected, but not
always when looking at the business
value.
Design engineers can leverage
PROGAMMEABLE PLATFORMS IoT DESIGN
three key trends when designing for
the Internet of Things (IoT) space
to greatly reduce time to data
visualisation, enabling engineers to
focus on the activities that make their
design significant and valuable.
YOU’RE NOT ON YOUR OWN!
What tools and platforms are available to design engineers when
designing for the IoT space? By Robbie Paul
understand the differences between
those technologies – there are people
out there that have already done that
work.
A simplified design flow reduces
the overall time to data visualisation.
Free tools, for example Digi-Key’s
Scheme-It and DK IoT Studio allow
designers to produce professional
schematic diagrams and deploy fullycompleted
cloud IoT solutions.
Design leverage
IoT design requires knowledge
across multiple disciplines. There’s
a hardware component, a software
component and a cloud component,
and typically those involved with each
of these components are specialty
engineers.
So, if an engineer specialises in
hardware, they might not be as strong
at the software and cloud pieces, and
vice versa. That is why it’s always a
team approach in IoT - because of the
Figure 1: DK IoT
Studio with Adafruit
4450 mini smart
home
multiple disciplines involved.
But that’s also part of the
challenge if you’re at a small start-up
coming up with the next ‘great’ idea
– you don’t necessarily have that
full team of specialised engineers to
hand.
For companies in that position,
there are many online communities
sharing knowledge to further
everyone’s designs, even Amazon and
Google put their code on open source
and engineers just need to pull in the
right APIs to make everything work.
For example, if you want voice
recognition with Alexa or Google
Home, it’s easy to do. You don’t have
to be an expert in voice recognition,
you can just pull the right APIs
and make a call to them and you
seamlessly have voice recognition.
Online communities have set
up forums and project repositories
to share knowledge, and code
repositories like GitHub bring together
millions of developers to share and
build improved solutions.
Leveraging open source
communities as well as hardware
design environments often help
remove barriers to system design and
allow for quicker implementations.
By designing in a tool like the
open source EDA KiCad environment,
engineers can be exposed to
resources for everything from basic
design creation tutorials to a robust
community support network.
Should even greater expertise
be required, there are also design
service providers, a network of design
firms offering fee-based development,
prototyping, manufacturing and
systems integrations services.
Advanced deployment
Beyond getting a single prototype
up and running, when ready to scale
to a production environment or fullfledged
deployment, designers have
to bring in the security elements and
consider adding a cloud services layer
to the mix. Most designers can get
to the single prototype stage quickly,
Rapid prototyping
The first is rapid prototyping. The
key here is to not over-engineer - you
have to keep in mind the most viable
product. In order to get there quickly,
engineers should leverage resources,
such as a reference design library (RDL)
and take a modular-based approach.
There are already complete
ecosystems created such as Arduino,
Raspberry Pi or Adafruit Feather for
engineers to build into. From there
they can select the appropriate add-on
technologies like shields, hats, feather
wings, Click boards, XBee, etc. or
expand via connector ecosystems like
Grove or Qwiic to create an initial proof
of concept.
There’s no need for every engineer
to be an RF expert. Communications
have been simplified with modules
allowing for easy implementation of
everything from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to
NB-IoT and LoRa.
Design engineers don’t even have to
www.newelectronics.co.uk 28 April 2020 25
/www.newelectronics.co.uk