https://slides.com/ajlennon/hands-on-hardware

Hands on Hardware

Alex J Lennon (ajlennon@dynamicdevices.co.uk)

Julian Todd (julian@goatchurch.org.uk)

• Started with Embedded Systems in '96
• 188EB / 386EX target boards,
• Mainly C & Assembler code (Borland Turbo C!)
• Bare Metal Programming, Proprietary RTOSses, Proprietary wired communications 

PC/104 AIM104-386EX ('98)

STEBus Target 188EB ('96)

25MHz, 128KB RAM, 128KB ROM

33MHz, 512KB RAM, 512KB ROM

In The Beginning...

• Everything was very proprietary and "roll your own"
• Needed open standards based Internet Communications
• Embedding TCP/IP stacks in little black boxes ('98)

TCP/IP Communications

The OpenSource Revolution & Linux

SBC104 ('96)

• 25MHz 386
• 2MB RAM, 1MB FLASH

Time Passes...

• Pervasive Devices
• Machine 2 Machine (M2M)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

Arduino Diecimila (2007)

16MHz, 16KB Flash, 1KB RAM

Raspberry Pi (2013)

700MHz, 256MB RAM, SD Card Flash

An Explosion of IoT Devices

Resourcing the IoT ?

• Limited engineering resource
• Takes time to train experienced engineers
• Make development more accessible

• Leverage OpenSource and Best in Class Tools
• Leverage rapid prototyping languages such as MicroPython (2014)

What can we do?

Node-Red (IBM, 2013)

• OpenSource "Flow-based Programming" tool
• Wire up inputs to outputs with code blocks
• Very rapid and flexible prototyping 

Jupyter (2014)

• Interactive "NoteBook" environment
• Language agnostic (supports MicroPython)
• Shared Notebooks, Rapid Development Cycles

Hands On: ESP32

160/240MHz, 520MB RAM, 1MB+

2.4GHz WiFi, Bluetooth BLE

FiPy adds NB-IoT, SigFox, LoRa

TTGO Range

PyCom FiPy

Many Diagrams Make it Look Complicated

The Plan Today!

A Sensor Data Flow