Designing Hardware for the Internet of Things

http://www.evenchick.com/cc3000-shield-and-the-internet-of-things.html

by evck • 13 years ago

38 26 13 years ago

dccoolgai3• 13 years ago

This looks like a nice shield for that cc3300. Nice to see more hw-related stuff on HN - thanks for sharing.

evck6• 13 years ago

I'd like to write more hw stuff for the HN audience. I'm curious if there's anything in particular that the HN community, who seem to be more sw focused, would like to see.

dccoolgai3• 13 years ago

IMHO most real innovation is happening in the space between hw and sw (duino / pi / etc.). The idea that you can call yourself an "innovator" and only know software is quickly becoming quaint. I don't claim to speak for the HN community-at-large, but I'm interested in seeing anything in the vein of hw/sw synthesis like this.

ISL• 13 years ago

Fear not, there are hardware lovers here too.

sparky3• 13 years ago

FWIW, that image is a preview from the OSH Park ordering site[1]. I can highly recommend the service for prototype 2- and 4-layer boards. The price is right, the turnaround time and customer service are awesome, and the specs are better than anything else I've found in the price range. And they're purple.

[1] http://www.oshpark.com

evck6• 13 years ago

Yep, it's an OSHPark render. I'm not quite ready to release the design files, so I figured I'd post that picture since it's nice an purple.

I'd also recommend OSHPark.

sparky3• 13 years ago

Good luck with the waveguide! Have you done anything that high-speed with OSH Park before? I'm waiting on a PCIe board from them that I hope will do Gen3 speeds (8GHz) over 2.5-inch traces, but the lack of impedance control has me nervous.

I suppose the waveguide looks pretty short (under an inch?) so it might not matter much?

outside1234• 13 years ago

Awesome - keep up the great work!

I'm working on one of the next upstream problems in the IoT space: once you have a way to connect a device this to a network, how do you tie it into the greater set of things, program it, make it discoverable, and manage it.

My stab at this is called Magenta, which is an MIT licensed project based on node.js that aims to make it easy to build devices that can securely communicate in real time and applications that interact with those devices over a message passing model (its hard to explain in one paragraph but think of it like this: twitter for devices with agents watching those messages).

I'm only a month into it and a few hundred commits, but if you are interested, check out the (very early) project at https://github.com/magentajs or contact me on twitter at @timpark. I would love to get some feedback or find folks interested in helping collaborate on one of the subprojects (client sdk, service, administration tool, or use it to build devices and provide feedback and bugs).

Ok, I'm done hijacking your thread!

izak30• 13 years ago

Similarly, check out plumgarage.com; tackling a different side of the problem.

evck6• 13 years ago

Thanks for sharing that, I'll check it out. One problem I'm looking forward to working on is what the embedded device will do to take care of communications, and what the firmware to do that looks like. Lots of neat problem including authentication, minimizing power consumption, etc...

mschuster912• 13 years ago

The CC3000 is IPv4 only - what the fk?! I understand it greatly increases cost in manufacturing, but isn't one of the key sale points of IPv6 that the IPv4 address space is going to run out in part because of the Internet of Things!?

bhb9162• 13 years ago

Eh. Is everything in my house (i.e. my subnet 192.168..) going to run out of IPV4 addresses? Right now cost is a far more important factor.

mschuster912• 13 years ago

People need to get used to IPv6 development. IPv6 development and deployment is way way behind schedule already, to sell NEW stuff today without IPv6 support is foolish to say the least. All that stuff will have to be replaced in not-so-far future.

bhb9162• 13 years ago

Great work. I've been keeping a close eye on the CC3000 for some time. I've also looked at the Wi2Wi modules/chips. I've been working (whenever work and home allows) on some hardware to connect the CC3000 with a Xilinx FPGA. Hopefull, I will have some results soon.

Also, I really like seeing hardware on the front page.

mbell• 13 years ago

Cool project.

If your interested in some feedback on the PCB layout I'd be happy to help (e-mail in profile). There are a few things about the pictured layout that will make it very prone to noise and EM radiation as well as some heat dissipation issues.

evck6• 13 years ago

I would really appreciate your feedback. Can't see your email though. Could you get in touch through my site (under About)?

ippisl• 13 years ago

Another interesting internet of things module: " The RS9113 M2MCombo supports dual-band 802.11n and dual-mode BT 4.0 in addition to Zigbee. Redpine (San Jose, Calif.) will ship the device before June in a variety of module form factors at a cost of $6 in 100,000-unit quantities."[1]

Hopefully it will also get into a shield form factor, at a reasonable price, since it seems ideal to trying all kinds of things out.

[1]http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4406270/Redpine-devi...

zmanian• 13 years ago

I'll point out that it is very clear that there will be BLE support in stock android(Samsung supports BLE via a device specific SDK) after the Google IO release of the Android.

Google's Glass supports BLE based on the FCC approval documents. It appears that BLE support was prioritized after the Bluetooth stack rewrite that happened in 4.2.

The Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 all have hardware capable of BLE that should be available after the update.

pedrocr• 13 years ago

I've played around with a WiFly module sold by sparkfun that seems pretty functional and reasonably cheap at 35$.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822

Any idea how much cheaper this could be?

By the way your site doesn't seem to have a valid RSS or Atom feed. Your html has an incorrect feed link back to the homepage itself:

  <link href="./" type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate" title="Eric Evenchick ATOM Feed" />

Designing Hardware for the Internet of Things

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