The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming rapidly, and one way to keep up with this quickly changing design landscape is turnkey solutions enabled by IoT development kits and reference platforms. They significantly lower the barrier to entry and ease time-to-market pressures.
An endless stream of development kits is now made available for the IoT-enabled embedded systems for a wide range of consumer and industrial applications. These design-to-order hardware and software offerings usually pack a lot of functionality and features.
Therefore, it is imperative that engineers find out which IoT evaluation board best meets their design needs. For that, however, you first need to understand the fundamentals of IoT design kits.
What’s new in the embedded board design realm and how it relates to your IoT project? How can developers make a viable decision based on design tips and tricks and thus effectively match the IoT cost budgets with performance requirements? This article attempts to answer these questions while outlining do’s and don’ts for picking development and prototype boards for IoT designs.
This article will also focus on design ecosystems built around these boards and how that simplifies complex design tasks and accelerates the time to market. However, let us begin with the hardware facet of these off-the-shelf IoT boards.
Hardware Perspective
Here is a brief preview of how IoT kits and associated reference designs can dramatically simplify the hardware implementation challenges that IoT developers face while keeping up with the latest processors and connectivity standards.
First and foremost, a development kit should help you efficiently map out the functionality requirements of your IoT design. For instance, how much processing speed is required; how much memory capacity will be sufficient for storing the embedded code and data; and what’s the power consumption budget.
A predominant majority of IoT applications encompasses some kind of wireless connectivity—WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, etc.—and this is where a development kit can help engineers manage the inherently tricky RF and antenna designs. Even if the RF resources are available in-house, it requires time, money, and expertise.
An IoT design kit can also help developers identify key components such as antennas, filters, amplifiers, clocks, and capacitors; it also guides designers on component placement on the board. At the same time, development kits help avoid the hassles related to certifications, compliance, and interoperability of the components and modules.
The turnkey IoT solutions lower the barrier to entry for highly integrated designs like wearable devices by removing the design complexity and substituting for RF and embedded design expertise. That allows developers to have the IoT solutions up and running in weeks rather than months.
Software Perspective
The software side of development kits can also remove a tremendous amount of complexity from IoT design solutions. However, the IoT board suppliers offer different levels of software service and support, and you have to figure out what software bits and pieces bring you a greater competitive advantage.
Below are the key software tenets of a design kit that allow IoT developers to focus more on their application and less on software development.
A software development kit (SDK) abstracts IoT design complexity by providing design libraries, protocol stacks, easy-to-use APIs, debug interface, and application frameworks. Especially, in the IoT context, SDKs are widely used in validating the device-to-cloud connectivity.
An extensive set of libraries and utilities are available to help developers customize their design platform and make it more user-friendly. Watch out for the level of support and updates for these libraries and utilities.
Another key software-related consideration to review in the IoT kits is integrated development environment (IDE) that is commonly used for writing, compiling, and updating code. It helps IoT designs to run on multiple software platforms.
Many IoT development kits now come with complete application-enablement platforms. For example, many MCU development boards are now accompanied with boards specialized for evaluating the specific IoT applications.
Finally, beware of too much reliance on hardware vendors; MCU and MPU suppliers offering software goodies are not specialists in this area. These software offerings are mostly complementary. Therefore, apart from the software helping hand offered by these IoT design kits, be prepared to develop software in-house or seek help from third-party stack suppliers when it’s necessary.
Right Peripherals
In an IoT design, after the selection of processor, what’s probably most important to look at are peripherals. That includes a variety of communication interfaces such as Ethernet, USB, and serial ports. The IoT development boards usually support a reasonable amount of I/O features.
Peripheral validation is a critical part of the IoT design realm as peripheral devices like MEMS sensors are connected to an IoT system via interfaces such as USB, UART, SPI, I2C, and the analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
So make sure that the on-board I/O capabilities include analog input, digital I/O, ADC, and serial interfaces like I2C and SPI.
Also, carefully review the pin layout and ensure that different pins on the board support the appropriate features. The confusion regarding the pin layout can easily turn into a design nightmare.
Summary
Besides the key hardware, software and I/O offerings, these plug-and-play design solutions come with production-ready networking and security stacks. That includes pre-integrated connectivity stacks for the leading IoT cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, IBM BlueMix, and Microsoft Azure.
That just shows how these development boards can help engineers manage the design intricacies, and thus, help create the level playing field in the brave new world of IoT.
This article provides a balanced view of the major building blocks of IoT designs and shows how evaluation kits can facilitate flexible development pathways for the IoT designs in a shorter amount of time. Now it’s your call to narrow down the search and select a design-to-order solution that best suits your IoT application.