Development board deal serves developers and makers

MATRIX Creator is ideally suited for the development of applications in automation control systems, particularly for home automation systems involving optical and sound elements as well as robotics, enterprise logistics, voice assistants, beamforming/DoA algorithms, retail intelligence.

The microphone array, for example, allows a user to develop their own “do it yourself” Amazon Echo and Alexa based projects as well as voice recognition systems, with the eight microphones allowing devices to be activated from anywhere in a room.

Similarly, the optical and physical sensors enable the development of facial recognition and motion detection devices for security applications.

Ralf Buehler, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Premier Farnell said: “As the Development Distributor we work to source the latest innovative technology to help create opportunities for our existing and future builders, developers, makers and engineers. Products like MATRIX Creator provide huge flexibility to users – unlike existing add-ons which only provide individual elements of functionality, MATRIX Creator is a complete development eco-system that allows users to access a range of functionality to enhance any Raspberry Pi based project, speeding up the design process and helping to overcome the hurdles involved in the creation of innovative hardware projects.”

MATRIX Creator can help novices learn about hardware development and provides expert users with a versatile piece of hardware to add to their suite of development tools. It accelerates and reduces the overall cost of the prototyping process for new products and devices, doing the up-front heavy lifting so developers don’t have to.

The development board, designed for Raspberry Pi, incorporates a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, an ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, a range of sensors for motion, temperature, humidity, light, ultraviolet and infrared, an 8-microphone array and a 35-LED array.

The board, which can be programmed in 40 different languages, also incorporates integrated Z-Wave and zigbee communications plus connectivity via a wide range of analogue and digital input/output interfaces.

It can also be used in stand-alone mode using its onboard processing capability.

Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and Co-Founder of MATRIX Labs says, “MATRIX Creator is a hugely exciting product, doing for the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, what smartphones did for the mobile revolution. MATRIX Creator has deep product functionality and we expect broad appeal – it’s the perfect combination of an easy-to-use yet also sophisticated dev board, which appeals to the maker, the expert developer, and everyone in between. MATRIX Creator allows developers of virtually any skill-level to create whatever exists in their mind’s eye, shifting the product development paradigm from one that relies on a third party to create for you, to one where you can create the custom app that meet your exact needs. It’s putting power into the hands of the people and democratising IoT app development.”