By STMicroelectronics 191
STMicroelectronics' STEVAL-BCN002V1B evaluation kit contains a BlueNRG-Tile (STEVAL-BCN002V1) and a STEVAL-BCN002V1D programming board to program and debug the BlueNRG-Tile.
BlueNRG-Tile is the core of an all-in-one IoT-node development kit from STMicroelectronics. The very small tile/coin is built around ST's BlueNRG-2 Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 single-mode system-on-chip (SoC) that provides control and processing power to a full complement of sensors, while also communicating via Bluetooth with a free iOS or Android demo app on a nearby smartphone. For multi-node applications, the BlueNRG-2 SoC, which is powered by an Arm® Cortex®-M0 core with up to 256 KB of embedded Flash memory, supports mesh networking up to 32 k nodes, substantially extending the range of sensing and remote monitoring to any needs, from smart-home to large-scale industrial infrastructure.
Surrounding the BlueNRG-2 SoC, ST has packed a full-featured ultra-low-power sensor portfolio, which includes an accelerometer and gyroscope, a magnetometer, pressure, and humidity and temperature sensors, a microphone, and a FlightSense™ time-of-flight sensor. With a highly optimized sensor architecture, the BlueNRG-2 SoC specs just 900 nA sleep current (with full data retention) and full-system stand-by power as low as 25 µA. More notably it also achieves ultra-fast wake-up capability, efficient execution of 9-axis inertial sensor fusion (running the ST MotionFX sensor-fusion code optimized for the Arm Cortex-M0) and streaming of real-time, low-latency data consuming just 1.4 mA at 25 Hz.
Still, the miniaturized MEMS sensor portfolio and the highly integrated BlueNRG-2 SoC, together with a size-optimized RF balun, have allowed ST to squeeze the coin's size down to 2.5 cm diameter. Even so, the BlueNRG-Tile development kit, which is accessed for programming and debugging through a motherboard that together with the tile/coin compose an Eval kit, offers a convenient on-board debugging and programming interface, multi-color LED, and a configurable wake-up push-button.
ST offers the sensor node with a comprehensive software development kit (SDK) that includes everything needed to forge a smarter and readily usable IoT node or network of nodes. The SDK comes with BlueNRG-Mesh networking library, MEMS sensor algorithms including 9-axis sensor fusion and event detection, voice-over-BLE code, and a bunch of ready-to-go examples in source code.