Digi-Key at embedded world 2023 with Seeed Studio

Seeed Studio, also known as Seeed Technology, create innovative IoT solutions specialising in hardware research, production and sales for edge computing, network communication and smart sensing applications.

Their advanced perception system leverages the latest advancements in machine learning, computer vision, and IoT to provide real-time insights and analytics that help businesses optimise their operations, reduce costs, and improve their customer experiences.

“We started with the open hardware movement and all the micro-communities by making and building [everything from sensor microcontrollers to the display] for them and we also provide services for startups and the engineers who go all the way from ideas to prototype and to product.

But for the last five years we’ve found that it’s very difficult for engineers to build things from scratch. To avoid that, we built a device as a reference design.”

An example of this is their wireless smart agriculture kit for remote monitoring of weather conditions and soil parameters with LoRaWAN sensors.

“It’s not an easy job. It has to survive all seasons and it has to be very cost effective and it has to have very low power consumption – and it has to be open so we can build all types of things on top of that.”

The importance of sensors in the digital world

For industries such as land engineering, Pan believes that they “will look in their own programme and find their own way to use [the sensor]”, especially in AI where they can reinvent the sensor in a different way. “Whenever a new sensor is invented, we find a new way of solving problems.”

Pan believes that the sensor is more than the ‘feeler’ of the digital world, it’s also a basis for science that can be applied into different industries.

Challenging sensors

The current challenge around sensors is how is the node of power efficiency maximised, the distance of transmission, the precision across different sensors, whilst making sure they’re a low process, to enable them to be deployed everywhere.

However, new sensors are being invented all the time, and with them, Pan believes, so is industries ability to learn more.

With over 1,000 types of sensors under their belts, including AI sensors and low-power camera modules, Seeed Studios are now focusing their attention on agriculture for environmental monitoring.

With the advancement of sensors and their prevalence in society anything is possible.

To hear about all this and more, including the impact of IoT in the Edge on single board computers and Seeed Studio’s fleet of Edge dev watch the full interview here: