Let’s Talk IoT Devices: IoT Boards

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Soracom’s Let’s Talk IoT Devices webinar series. Please use the built in chat function during this session if you have any questions. We will be happy to answer. Today, we will focus on IoT boards. Selecting the right board is a key decision that directly impacts the scalability as well as the security of your IoT project. We will go through the advantages and disadvantages of different board types and the recommended use cases for each. By the end of this session, I hope you will have a clear understanding of which board type suits you and your IoT case the most. Let me quickly introduce myself. I’m Dora, and I am an IoT Device Product Manager at Soracom. I’ve been working within the IoT sector for over ten years now. I’m very passionate about digitalization and IoT product management, and I love to develop product ideas from scratch and bring them to the market as new commercial product offerings. Let me also introduce you to Soracom. We are an IoT connectivity and service provider, originally from Japan. We offer not only affordable and reliable IoT connectivity, but we also help to accelerate our customers’ speed to market, and we make it easy to connect to the cloud. Our solutions also help our customers reduce data consumption and costs, we have a very clear pay as you go model, and we offer many other innovative solutions based on our cloud agnostic platform. Soracom was founded in twenty fifteen by former AWS and telco veterans. Today, we have physical offices in Tokyo, Seattle, and London. Our global team is distributed all over the world. We are very proud to serve more than twenty thousand customers, including start ups, small and medium businesses, and global enterprises across all industries, from agriculture to energy, construction, transportation, consumer electronics, manufacturing, real estate management, healthcare services, you name it, and we will have a fitting IoT application. In fact, you will find the Soracom SIM in over four million devices all around the world. We are financially supported by KDDI in Japan. KDDI is one of the largest telco operators. And we also got some investment from technology innovators, including Sony, Hitachi, and SECOM. Let’s see what you need to consider before you kick start your IoT journey. We will focus on five different points: your use case, your technology choice, coverage requirement, scalability, and then security. One of the most important factors is the use case behind your IoT application. You need to have a clear view of why you are starting your IoT journey. Do you want to harvest data and use it to optimize an existing product? Or do you want to improve an existing business process and increase maybe production efficiency? Or are you just curious about how technology can help improve your operations? The first step is the same as in any other project: figure out what you need. The next area is to discover what technology fits your use case the best. We at Soracom can help our customers with many different connectivity types, ranging from cellular connectivity through low power wide area, including narrowband, LTE M, Sigfox, even LoRa in Japan. And we also offer Wi Fi Ethernet and satellite based connectivity. It’s very important that your technology choice also goes hand in hand with how often and how much data you need to collect from your application. All the different connectivity types have different capabilities. After selecting the right technology, let’s check where you would like to place your IoT device. Where and how you deploy your devices will likely drive most of your other hardware requirements, such as if you need an external antenna. In almost all cases, it will be a significant factor in device costs. Luckily, location requirements for IoT can generally be given as a combination of just two factors: geographic location and mobility. Geographic coverage or location can be divided in three sub areas, be it local, national, and global coverage. And as far as mobility is concerned, a device can be either static or constantly on the move or mobile. Let’s look at scalability. Our recommendation is to always design your IoT solution with scalability in mind. Start with a minimum viable product or MVP. And this is because you will need to consider how your devices are going to fit into existing business processes and what new systems will need to be put in place to manage them effectively. The last area is security. And we always recommend to think about potential security threats from the very beginning and close off any opportunities for vulnerability. Whether you are prototyping or building a scalable IoT product, you always want to choose hardware that offers a consistent platform environment as well as ease of deployment. When sourcing prototyping and production hardware, you always want to examine its accessibility, affordability, the integration possibilities around it, and the manufacturing features. If you are actually in the prototyping phase, you need to consider the following five factors. Ease of use comes with ready made tools and takes little time to set up. Modularity checks in if your device is going to be compatible with any other hardware ecosystems. Flexibility is the next one. Will it be possible to tweak your device along the proof of concept phase? Low cost it brings us to the affordability of the hardware. And the last one is features and functionality, which can concern the processing speed, the input voltage, the memory size, as well as the different accessories belonging to the actual board, be it shields or pins or hats that you will actually connect into the boards. If you are ready to scale up your project, here is what you need to take into consideration. Reliability is the first factor. You can ask yourself if your device is environmentally robust enough. Will the design withstand extreme temperature or weather? The next one is manufacturability. In other words, ability to mass produce. Will you be able to cover volume based production? Very much connected to it comes the high volumes aspect. Can your components be purchased in bulk via a reliable OEM or distribution partner? Ease of integration is also something to be considered should the device have complete product certifications, for instance. And the last one is about the readiness for successfully bringing your product out to the market. These include the readiness of a technical data sheet, product brief, warranty, and of course the customer support setup behind the actual product. Now let’s look at the actual IoT boards. In today’s session, we are zooming into the three most common types of IoT boards: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Sony Spresence. We know that there are plenty of other boards out there, but based on our customers’ experience, these above three have the most relevant capabilities that most developers need to kickstart their IoT projects. So, which board will you need? There is a rule of thumb which says that describing your IoT project in a simple sentence can help you make an easy choice. If you can do so with one or two ends, you should get an Arduino. If you need more than two ends, your task would be better handled by a Raspberry Pi. And if your use case requires an integrated GPS, maybe a multi microphone input and high resolution audio output, we recommend you to get the Sony Spresence. Now let’s take a closer look at the technical capabilities and the specifications of each of these boards. Let me go back a bit in in history and see the origins of these devices. If we take Arduino off the left hand side, it is a single board microcontroller, which was developed in Italy back in the early 2000s. It was originally designed for prototyping and device connectivity, and it still remains an open source hardware and software project. It is a microcontroller, and it can be used to perform one task at a time, again and again. It’s a quite easy to use board, and it reads your instructions and turns them into different types of output. Arduino boards are designed, and then they are produced by different companies. There are several dozens of Arduino branded boards out there. Every board has its componentry and different number of input output general purpose pins. The memory capacity is also different, and there are also other features that vary board by board. Arduino Uno, the one that I’m holding in my hand, is probably the most popular board under this brand, but there is also Arduino Mega and Leonardo and there is also an Arduino Due. If we take a look at Raspberry Pi, it also came as an educational tool, and it was designed to introduce kids to coding and computer circuits. But programmers and hackers also grasped the huge potential of the pie. It’s in fact a fully fledged computer, just a teeny tiny one. It usually comes in a credit card size. I do have a Raspberry Pi Pico in my hand, and you can see that it is much, much smaller than a credit card size. What’s cool with Raspberry Pis is that they have their own processors, their own memory, and also the graphics processing unit. And the componentry varies from model to model. They usually run on Linux operating systems, and they run multiple programs at a time. That’s the big difference between Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Pi is also a closed source hardware. It’s also a big difference, and it’s produced only by the Raspberry Pi Foundation based out of the UK. The original version of the Raspberry Pi was released back in twenty twelve, and there have been fifteen different versions released since then. The best general purpose Raspberry Pi for the money is the Raspberry Pi 4B as of today. It’s available with different RAM sizes from two gigabytes to eight gigabytes, and the price tag is also increasing depending on the RAM size. It is powerful enough to power almost any IoT project. And then let’s touch base on Sony Spresence itself. Sony Spresence is a compact, high performance six core microcontroller board, and it offers a very dynamic computing set of capabilities. The power consumption is so low that the device can run on an actual battery. Spresence has a considerable number of unique features, and they set it apart from other development boards. For example, Spresence features an onboard GPS receiver, as well as audio codecs, which give high performance audio output. The board also features a real time clock and onboard flash memory. Spresence is more powerful than most microcontrollers, particularly when the extra cores are taken into consideration. And it boots in under a second, and it also runs real time code. So it is a very versatile tool for IoT that can be used for precise hardware control and even in edge settings. In the next few minutes, I would like to look at the pros and cons and the different use cases that can be applied per IoT board. Again, we’re gonna start with the Arduino. As you see, under the pros, we’ve listed the wide variety of extension options, which support many different number of functions. Those different extensions can be mounted with a series of pins. And I actually have a little project here in my hand. I’m putting together based on an Arduino MKR connector, a sensor for measuring distance based on ultrasound that is connected to an LCD display. You can see the actual boards and pins here. I’m gonna get this closer. This is how you actually connect together an Arduino and its pins. Hope you could see it. The disadvantage of using an Arduino is that the pin mounting means that extensions create a rather large footprint than some competing hardware options. As for the processing speed, an Arduino is usually slower than its competitors. As for the use cases, if you just need to control various hardware components or handle device actuation and data gathering, use the Arduino. Remember the one or two ends when you describe your use case. So you can, for instance, read and report temperature or humidity measurements with an Arduino. You can start your LED lights at home, you can build a smart plant watering system, or you can turn on an engine, a motor with the help of an Arduino. Next one in line is Raspberry. As for the Pi Pros, there is a hat for virtually every potential function you could want, And it boasts the fastest processor of its competitors. We’re going to talk about those in a bit. As for the cons, the Pi relies upon microSD for flash memory rather than any internal storage, and it has been known that the Pi can overheat under constant use. As earlier mentioned, the Raspberry Pi projects are for more complex tasks that require an operating system and actual multitasking. So the Pi finds its use in complex applications where you feel the need to use a computer, like if you are making a complicated robot, or you are looking to learn to hack, you are dealing with intricate calculations, or you need more processing power, and so on and so on. And because of its countless operating system options, the Pi functions as the foundation of many, many different projects. With desktop Linux distros, such as Raspbian and Ubuntu, you can actually cobble together the basic Linux desktop, which can be suitable for web browsing or multimedia consumption, light gaming, and even audio editing. You can also use a Raspberry Pi for media server and file server purposes. With smart home automation software, you can build a Raspberry Pi smart home hub. And robotics projects are also feasible with add on sensors, hats, and more. So the Pi is basically capable of tackling virtually any IoT tasks. We’re gonna move on to the Spresence. As for the pros, the Spresence main board can be plugged into the Spresence extension board, which by default augments the existing main board with an SD card slot, and an extra USB port, and the headphone jack, and multiple microphone pins. It’s very, very cool. It also provides PIN compatibility with selected Arduino shields. It’s also very good to remember. And depending on the use case, the main board is also compatible with several add on boards, like the HDR camera board and external modules that can provide Wi Fi or, for instance, sensor add ons. The sensor add ons track, for instance, acceleration, pressure, and they can be expanded to monitor illumination, proximity, and a lot more other things. As for Spresence, I warmly recommend you to actually check out our GitHub repository under the Soracom lab, which includes different example codes for the Spresence LTE M extension board. And for the use cases, you already heard the unique capabilities of Spresence. And those mean that it can support again, a wide range of IoT use cases. Considering its processing power and its energy efficiency, it is very ideal in deployments that evolve, for instance, sensor analysis or machine learning. Image processing is also something that Spresence excels at. Also data filtering and providing resilient, reliable performance, where other microcontroller-based alternatives fall short. So Spresence is perfect for IoT application projects based on GPS or microphone input. And you can see the recommended use cases, for instance, smart speakers or time lapse cameras, or plant growth estimations. Even drones utilizing the internal GPS and the high performance processors can be made. So there are a lot of different options and opportunities with Spresence. If we look at Soracom again, we can talk about what we can bring to your developer table. We securely connect any number of IoT devices, including IoT boards, over a blended mix of connections. And we’ve been talking about cellular, Wi Fi, Ethernet, Sigfox, and even satellite earlier. We can access two g, three g, four g, or LTE, and LTE M or Cat M1 networks in over one hundred and fifty countries across the globe. And we also provide connectivity using any standard Internet connection, such as Wi Fi, Ethernet, or even satellite. And on top of LTE M, we also offer LPWA solutions or low power wide area solutions, such as Sigfox. On this slide, I would like to show you the different connectivity kits that you can find in our Soracom store under www.soracom.io You can see that each kit is based on the previously mentioned boards and their different accessories. We have actually combined them in different packages, and I hope many of you will find the right kit here that will fit your IoT project needs. On our website, there are many interesting reads, including additional blog posts and how to guides. If you have any questions about the content of this webinar, please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] My colleagues will also help you connect with any solution architect who can help you discuss your project through and give you some ideas and also some support. Our motto is You create, we connect. So we are very much looking forward to working with you. Thank you for being here today. I hope to see you at the next episode of Soracom’s Let’s Talk IoT Devices webinar. Goodbye for now.