Dev kit evolution for the IoT

The hardware development kit has been around for a while. Since they were introduced as a quicker and more convenient alternative to the breadboard, dev kits have become an extremely important tool for designers to evaluate competing hardware solutions and keep up to date with the latest technologies.

A recent report from analysts ABI Research predicted that the installed base for hardware development kits will double from approximately 11 million units in 2014 to 21 million units in 2020, with the growth largely ascribed to the increasing number of connected devices emerging as part of the IoT. The report also emphasised that manufacturers targeting IoT applications will need to differentiate their offerings by adding value added services such as dev kits to ease the development process for customers.

A more complex environment

In fact, this development process has become more complex as IoT device developers are increasingly faced with the requirement to work on technologies outside their area of expertise, which is where tools such as dev kits and reference designs are vital.

“We’re seeing traditional hardware engineers being required to engage more and more with a cloud-based solution. For a group used to tangible, ‘real world’ development, this is quite a dramatic shift in the techniques and tools they require,” said Marcus Bergsli, Global Strategic Alliance Business Manager at Farnell element14. “Conversely, cloud software developers are increasingly finding they need to think about hardware.”

Bergsli added that following the launch of Farnell Element 14’s first IoT starter kits, the company carried out a phone survey of some of the people that bought the kits to find out whether they were hardware or software developers.

“What was interesting was that each shared the same challenge - getting the support they needed once they’d left their field of expertise,” Bergsli added.

Regardless of what field they were working in, or their level of expertise, Bergsli’s experience is that one of the most important things for a successful dev kit to do is to work out of the box, with as little additional set-up as possible.

“This has become even more true today,” he said. “Increasingly we’re seeing suppliers develop their own boards that can offer plug-and-play type functionality for their own devices, allowing even the most complicated of development kits to work out of the box. This is expanding in to collaborations between traditional hardware manufacturers and cloud software providers, to ensure that leading products from both worlds seamlessly work together.”

Collaborations like these are bringing an increasing number of starter kits to the market, which aim to help developers working on the whole application in one kit, rather than a traditional dev kit which may only address one subsystem. These starter kits essentially amalgamate hardware and software development kits so they are ideal for developing small IoT applications, which typically incorporate a range of different technologies.

Starter kits, which require relatively little expertise to get up and running, are also aimed at hobbyists and the maker community, and start-up companies that may not have large design resources. The nature of the IoT is such that many successful product ideas come from these non-traditional sources, who have different needs compared to experienced developers.

Examples

As an example, Farnell Element 14 carries the LPC43S67 and A70CM Cloud Connectivity Kit (based on NXP MCUs) which offer a range of IoT suitable features such as NFC, AES128/192/256 encryption, Wi-Fi connectivity, Ethernet, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor and an LCD. The kit is aimed at anyone experimenting with IoT or cloud-backed mobile applications.

Imagination Technologies went a step further with its Creator Ci40 IoT starter kit - the company chose to list the kit on the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter. Alexandru Voica, Senior Marketing Communications Manager at Imagination Technologies, explained that using the crowd sourcing platform helped Imagination to get closer to developers and talk to them directly about the kit, almost using Kickstarter as part of an alpha trial programme. The kit was essentially presented to the audience and then refined based on user feedback. The kit can be improved much faster than it would be in the traditional design cycle, he added.

“The reaction on Kickstarter has been very positive,” said Voica. “One backer for example told me that he thought Creator Ci40 was the best IoT maker kit he’d seen to date. He also said he felt it had been well thought through and included the right mix of hardware, software and cloud services integration. We were really happy to hear such positive feedback, and this is a perfect example of the honest feedback mechanism that Kickstarter offers. I was also pleasantly surprised to see some of our competitors praising our bold approach on social media.”

The Creator Ci40 board (Figure 2 - page 33) runs a number of GNU/Linux distributions but also Brillo, the new operating system from Google. It comes with a pre-built open source software framework optimised for IoT applications, and communication is via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or 802.15.4 (Thread, ZigBee, and other protocols). There are over 200 plug-and-play sensor boards available and more are being released every week. The kit also includes free access to FlowCloud, a cloud platform for storing sensor readings to the cloud.

“Operating system developers will be happy to have access to a modern CPU architecture which includes the features that are exciting for them, for example, a multi-core chip with hardware multi-threading,” Voica added. “Other boards reuse existing phone chips for IoT - this leads to increased power consumption and we’ve seen those problems appearing in some smart watches. For Creator, we’ve integrated a chip that has been optimised for the IoT, with an optimal feature set that will be useful for this market.”

Voica also notes that the IoT is still an emerging market, which hasn’t standardised or defined best practices. For example, there are at least a dozen connectivity protocols involved and it would take a lot of effort to build software stacks for all of them.

“Having an IoT starter kit can make a huge difference, especially for small to medium enterprises who lack the resources to invest in or evaluate traditional dev kits,” Voica commented, adding that the hardware and software are designed to work straight out of the box. “[SMEs] can then focus on their core area of expertise without worrying about the (sometimes huge) development costs.”

As the nature of the IoT continues to evolve, the nature of development kits will continue to evolve. The popularity of the starter kit will continue to grow as more and more of them emerge to keep up with new technologies, new IoT applications, and new user types such as hobbyists, the maker community and start-up companies, which are instrumental in the development of some of the most innovative IoT products around today.