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NXP Introduction
to IoT Components
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An Introduction to IoT Components
March 7, 2017
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Sensor nodes on the Internet of Things enable formerly unimaginable levels of remote monitoring and control. From locomotives and jet engines to baby monitors and home
appliance controls, new applications are challenging the imaginations of designers — both in startup companies and within giant corporations. Which will be the next billion-dollar
product line? They wonder.
Remarkably, dramatic results can many times be obtained with low-cost building blocks. This article reviews some of the readily available semiconductor
components, and suggests some data gathering nodes which can put them to use.
Introduction
If it does nothing else, the vast collection of sensor data gathering tools called the Internet of Things (IoT) will offer extremely granular electronic monitoring systems. Enabled by
arrays of inexpensive components — intelligent sensors and data analysis tools — new smart buildings will provide not only dramatic energy savings but also
improve the productivity
of occupants. Self-driving cars will provide safety levels surpassing their human-piloted counterparts. And healthcare data banks will improve diagnostics and relieve infirmities.
IoT monitoring lends itself to dramatic transformations in otherwise traditional businesses. General Electric Aviation, for example, no longer sells jet engines: GE “rents” them. Each
rental comes with a service contract. Using thousands of sensors to collect terabytes of engine data, and examining historical data
across an entire jet fleet, GE technicians can
predict wear-and-tear on engine components — often months in advance of a possible failure. Pre-emptive maintenance “bursts,” have proved less costly than ordinary maintenance
“routines,” the company says
The sensor monitoring model can
be harnessed to automobiles, factory automation, machine tools, individual health and fitness monitoring — as well as jet engine maintenance.
There is a Smart Office Building example: Some 40% of the electricity used by an office skyscraper is devoted to interior lighting. But the lighting controls will not simply turn the
conference room lights on or off.
By monitoring ambient lighting, recognizing who is in a room, and also how it is used, the lighting controls can not only save electricity, but also
adjust the lighting of a room to increase the comfort and productivity of the people who use it.
While it becomes easier to imagine the energy savings the IoT enables
for industrial settings, note that not every IoT monitoring station requires a billion-dollar service contract. In
fact, the IoT itself has been inspired by the availability of low-cost components.
These include $2.50-processors, $1.50-sensors, and $1.00 communications ports. This has encouraged hobbyists and startups to come up with much more clever devices than
Internet-enabled garage door openers. The Nest Labs, for example, sold its plans for an IoT-enabled thermostat for $3.2 billion.
So accessible is the hardware for IoT sensor nodes that at least one market research firm has speculated that more than half of the IoT revenues in 2020
will come from monitoring
systems that have not been invented yet. Would you like to build one yourself?
Anatomy of a Wireless Sensor Node
We don’t need a jet engine sensor to control the lighting of a conference room in a smart building. But the topology of a smart building control node is likely to be very similar. There
are three main components for a wireless sensor node:
Sensors (often including sensor signal conditioning circuits in the same package)
Microcontrollers (including embedded memory, and power management in the same system-in-package)
Wireless (or Wired) Communications (the communications circuitry required for the sensor node to transmit data to a local network processor and/or the cloud computing
resource).
The components in an IoT node will vary in sophistication, depending on the application. While engineers have
a tendency to over-specify, they are usually reined in by cost
considerations. But the basic topology of a wireless sensor node always includes these free elements (see Figure 1).
