Devices: 'IoT', SBC, Low-Cost Robots, and PCBs
-
The Role of Operating Systems in IoT: Right-sizing OSes for your IoT environments
All of these smart devices have Operating Systems, regardless of how much or how little of them are exposed to the user. An Operating System is the software that runs on a device, manages the hardware, and ensures that components work together to perform some task. Some of these Operating Systems are very singular in their purpose, while others are general platforms that the owners can run custom applications on.
This article is going to look at the role Operating Systems have in IoT from the smallest battery powered sensors all the way up to central hubs that can manage dozens of cameras. We will look at how our favorite Operating System, FreeBSD, can fit into this environment.
-
Finding an SBC
A long long time ago on a server far away there was a website called Board-DB. This website made in 2014 was a list of single board computers that became popular after the whole Raspberry Pi thing happened.
-
A Low-Cost Robot Ready for Any Obstacle
The researchers trained the robot with 4,000 clones of it in a simulator, where they practiced walking and climbing on challenging terrain. The simulator's speed allowed the robot to gain six years of experience in a single day. The simulator also stored the motor skills it learned during training in a neural network that the researchers copied to the real robot. This approach did not require any hand-engineering of the robot's movements — a departure from traditional methods.
-
PCB Hotplate Has Integrated Heating Element Traces
Normally when we talk about PCBs and hotplates, we’re talking about reflowing solder. In this build from [Arnov Sharma], though, the PCB itself is the hotplate!