IoT Microcontrollers

IoT Microcontrollers

Microcontrollers are the core of many devices. Advanced functionallity which guarantees the autonomy of such solutions is the major advance of microcontrollers. Wireless data transfer of this solution enables communication between devices and updating of their software. Another advantage of microcontrollers is their low energy consumption which is very important for battery powered devices. To sum up, all those features make microcontrollers a perfect solution for IoT projects.

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Soyter Components offer includes Espressif, products. Espressif is a manufacturer of advanced industrial components for wireless communication. This manufacturer has wide range of programmable microcontrollers that are compatible with WiFi and Bluetooth. Espressif also offers modules, development and testing kits that are based on their SoCs. Espressif products have Fixed-BOM declaration, from 10 to 12 years of manufacturer support, fully legit MAC addresses and all necessary certificates.

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EspressifESP32 chip is used in many applications. This SoC is marked by low energy consumption, high performance and functionality (which includes WiFi and Bluetooth communication). The basis of ESP32 chip is 32-bit 240 MHz clocked core. Next to it we have energy-sufficient cooprocessor which manages deep-sleep function. ESP32 microcontroller also supports many perypherals and interfaces like DAC/ADC converters, I2C, UART, SPI, CAN 2.0, PWM or RWII. SoC has integrated 520 KB SRAM and 448 KB ROM memory.

Supported communication standards:

• WiFi - 802.11 b/g/n/e/i (802.11n @ 2.4 GHz up to 150 Mbit/s)
• Bluetooth - v4.2 BR/EDR i Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Security is one of the crucial issues in IoT applications. Espressif SoC's support WFA, WPA/WPA2 i WAPI, Secure Boot, Flash encryption, 1024-bit OTP (768-bit for clients) and AES, SHA-2, RSA, ECC, RNG.

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There are many variants of ESP32: SoC - ESP32-D2WD with 2 MB FLASH and System-in-Package - ESP32-PICO-D4, with 4 MB FLASH. There are more differences than only amount of FLASH memory. SiP version of ESP32 , includes crystal, filtering capacitor and RF lines. Different is also the package of those versions: for ESP32-PICO-D4 it is LGA and for ESP32-D2WD - QFN48. There are also few variants of ESP32-D2WD for example versions with one core or variants without FLASH memory.

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There is no chance to fully make use of microcontrollers without certain software. There is wide range of operating systems that can be used with ESP32 microcontrollers, e.g. Arduino IDE, Mongoose OS, Zephyr Project, Lua, MicroPython

Only few operating systems has sufficient functionality to fulfill requirements of the top grade projects. One of these systems is Amazon FreeRTOS. Enormous experience, the newest technology and position of Amazon in the market are only few advantages of this solution. A:FreeRTOS gives a chance to forget about connectivity problems, communication restrictions between different platforms or problems with licences and fragmented code. Amazon operating system gets rid of these issues, enables connection with AWS IoT Core cloud and local access points like AWS Greengrass. Amazon extended the kernel of FreeRTOS system by adding simple API which does not drain the memory. Amazon FreeRTOS gives a chance to connect the IoT devices with cloud, update them by OTA or encrypt data..