For the Internet of Things (IoT) to reach its full potential, IoT devices need to be effective and affordable, which means minimising the complexities of updating hardware while maximising the life of the hardware and keeping costs low, writes Simon Bisson in an article for ZDNet. While tools like Raspberry Pi and Arduino are popular prototypes for the IoT, they are vastly over-powered for most devices, adding unnecessary complexity and therefore cost. The solution is a new generation of microcontrollers called “FPGAs” that can run on low-cost chips such as Atmel ATmega328P or BeagleBone Black. His solution to powering a cheap and flexible IoT is to go back in time to the days of 8-bit computers which consumed very little power and had simple memory management schemes and therefore would be low-cost to produce. Built around an 8-bit PIC micro-controller, it's a simple platform for building basic wearable electronics, mixing sensors with an LED-matrix display. The only problem, he says, would be finding programmers with the necessary skills which were developed on such old hardware.
For the Internet of Things (IoT) to reach its full potential, IoT devices need to be effective and affordable, which means minimising the complexities of updating hardware while maximising the life of the hardware and keeping costs low, writes Simon Bisson in an article for ZDNet. While tools like Raspberry Pi and Arduino are popular prototypes for the IoT, they are vastly over-powered for most devices, adding unnecessary complexity and therefore cost. The solution is a new generation of microcontrollers called “FPGAs” that can run on low-cost chips such as Atmel ATmega328P or BeagleBone Black. His solution to powering a cheap and flexible IoT is to go back in time to the days of 8-bit computers which consumed very little power and had simple memory management schemes and therefore would be low-cost to produce. The only problem, he says, would be finding programmers with the necessary skills which were developed on such old hardware.