4 hardware kits to speed IoT development, or to sharpen your IoT chops

By Warren Miller, contributing writer

You may be ready right now to tackle an IoT design, or maybe you still need to become more knowledgeable about the intricacies of developing an IoT application. Either way, the most efficient method for getting up to speed is to grab a hardware development kit and begin a project. The project could be your next work assignment or just a fun project that demonstrates some IoT “smarts.” Today’s hardware kits come with a wide variety of software tools, documentation, and example projects that let you start from a working project and customize it for your specific application. Below are four development kits for common IoT applications.

The Arrow ARIS Development Kit — data aggregation and sensing

This kit offers a complete development environment — both hardware and software. These aren’t your everyday hardware and software elements, either. The hardware features the Renesas Synergy S7G2 MCU with an embedded 240-MHz ARM Cortex-M4 processor and memory and peripherals — like USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — just right for common IoT applications. The board even hosts a three-axis acceleration sensor, a two-axis gyroscope, and temperature and humidity sensors, making it a great platform for intelligent sensing and sensor-fusion applications. The software is a real eye-opener, featuring a no-cost version of the Express Logic ThreadX RTOS and stacks for Ethernet, USB, graphics for GUI support, file system support, and powerful debugging and profiling tools. Find out more.

The Arrow ARIS. Image source: Arrow.

The Arrow ARIS EDGE — sensor fusion at the edge of your IoT system

Along with the ARIS platform, Arrow also offers the ARIS Edge, featuring the Renesas Synergy S1 MCU. The processor is a 32-MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ core, and the MCU has a variety of connectivity and power management peripherals. The ARIS EDGE hardware includes a multi-protocol radio module that supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.1/4.2), Thread, and ZigBee stacks. The board also includes motion detection via 9-degrees-of-freedom IMU with sensor-fusion capabilities, environmental temperature, humidity, and ambient light sampling. This combination of wireless communications and sensing makes the ARIS EDGE a perfect target for sensing applications at the edge of your IoT sensing system.

Motor Control Development Kits — ST Microelectronics

After you acquire and process your sensor information, you may need to control a valve, a window blind, a door lock, or something else in the physical world. A common way to interact with the environment is via a motor. MCUs have been used in motor control for decades, and many new MCUs have special motor control capabilities to simplify these applications. ST Microelectronics has a wide range of motor control development kits that can give you just the right combination of power, performance, and price that you need for your IoT system. Check out the list of ST Microelectronics motor control solution evaluation boards.

Texas Instruments Sensor Tag Kit

The TI Sensor Tag kit has been around for a couple of years, but it is still one of the smallest, easiest-to-use, and most powerful IoT wireless sensor solutions available. The Wi-Fi version, the CC3200STK-WIFIMK, allows you to connect sensors directly to the cloud right out of the box. The board is powered directly from AAA batteries and hosts nine low-power MEMS sensors and is, therefore, particularly useful for low-power applications. Find out more.

These are just a few of the IoT-targeted development kits available to speed your IoT designs. Find the one that best meets your needs for either a work project or a study project. Modern IoT targeted kits pack all the hardware, software, and example projects that you need to become an expert — you just need to get a kit and start developing!