ARM Community: Build your own Smart Connected Devices - ARM Community

With 50 billion web-connected devices in less than 10 years from now as predicted by Ericsson…will result in around 7 devices per person on earth at that time! New devices appear every day ranging from small and cheap temperature sensors to computing and display-intensive multimedia devices. Common for all is the need for communication; various communication technologies will be used, such as cost effective and widely deployed wireless cellular 2G/3G/4G technologies. Also mobile network operators are providing dedicated front and backend offerings for machine-to-machine (“M2M”) communication enabling security, monitoring, tracking and other services.

Enable the market

To make this a reality there needs to be easy ways to prototype, test and productize all shapes, forms and sizes of energy and cost efficient devices. So the availability of cheap and accessible development platforms providing suitable applications environments and communication functionality are key. Here ARM’s Connected Community® comes into play. Mbed with NXP’s Cortex-M3-based chip has created a vibrant community developing all sorts of weird and wonderful devices, this combined with suitable connectivity is an excellent development platform for M2M devices.

For higher end devices prototyping, take a look at BugLabs whose TI OMAP-based offering includes camera/positioning/screen/video/3G modules. Also Linaro’s partners Samsung, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments and Freescale, to name a few, all have Linaros’ Linux optimizations running on their platforms and lively communities using their Cortex-A processor based development boards; add in a suitable modem connectivity and we have a connected device development platform.

With software, optimized tools from the above and from ARM enables efficient development and debugging is possible. By using HTML5 provides GUI and presentation device flexibility and dynamics and TrustZone based security is available in the Cortex-A processor cores.

We’re right now discussing with several hard and software companies, development communities, service providers and mobile operators around this, and I’d love to hear about your plans and ideas here!

Richard Stamvik, Segment Marketing, ARM, calls on telecom operators and media broadcasters to understand where they are going and how ARM with ecosystem partners can help them get there. Richard has experience in the mobile communications and real-time industries having spent 15 years at Telelogic, Motorola, Ericsson and ST-Ericsson in many different roles. He also, loves using his communications, media and other electronic gadgets for redesigning his house and improving his half marathon record.