Imagination Technologies leverages kickstarter for IoT kit launch
Presented as the ‘IoT in a box’ kit on kickstarter, the Creator Ci40 IoT hub board will be packed together with click-on peripheral modules for added functionality, but also software building blocks, open source software frameworks, the network stacks and the cloud connectivity capabilities required to securely connect and authenticate devices to the cloud.
The board has been designed around a brand new 550MHz dual-core, dual-threaded MIPS CPU produced on GlobalFoundries’ 40nm low power process node. It runs OpenWrt and a multi-standard connectivity package (802.11 ac, Bluetooth, 802.15.4, fast Ethernet), with room for further expansion. It also features a number of peripheral I/Os, including a mikroBUS socket and a Raspberry Pi pin-compatible interface.
The kit comes with five Clicker boards from MikroElektronika, including two battery-powered boards with a dedicated 6LoWPAN chip and the mikroBUS socket for adding sensors, and three sensor boards for temperature, motion detection and for controlling a relay. All feature a dedicated MIPS-based PIC32MX microcontroller. This is only to start with, since hundreds of other Click boards are available from MikroElektronika.
According to the Kickstarter campaign, starting a project is only a matter of stacking a Click board onto a battery-powered Clicker expansion board to obtain a standalone wireless device and program a connection with the Creator Ci40 IoT hub over the 6LoWPAN network. The processed sensor readings can then be sent out to the cloud through Imagination’s FlowCloud IoT framework for further analysis and reporting.
While Imagination Technologies could well have launched this product on its own dollars, it opted for Kickstarter as a way to collect valuable feedback from the crowd-sourcing site’s wide community of developers, also leveraging Kickstarter’s marketing tools and surveying capabilities.
Practically, this also enables the company to showcase the kit at a very competitive discounted price, though it is not clear whether the company would mull the project altogether should the kickstarter campaign prove unsuccessful.
See the full campaign at www.imgtec.com/creator/kickstarter
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