New-Tech Europe Magazine | June 2016

ARIS Board

Arrow

Arrow Electronics has announced the introduction of the ARIS Board, a ready-to-use Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and software solution. ARIS is the acronym for Arrow Renesas IoT Synergy, therefore showing the close cooperation between Arrow Electronics and Renesas and their Renesas Synergy™ development platform. The newly announced IoT Board is to enable users to develop their applications quickly and easily, in order to bring them to market in the shortest time possible. The ARIS Board was developed by the Italian company RELOC which focuses on embedded designs and the vertical integration of IoT applications. In addition to the development and production of the Board, RELOC also dealt with the implementation of the drivers and the generation of the middleware for managing the peripheral devices and has thus established an out-of-the- box IoT development environment. On the basis of the Renesas Synergy™ development platform, it helps to speed up the generation of IoT

designs by offering a faster and easier launch into the development process with a fully qualified and optimum hardware and software solution that boosts innovation and product differentiation. The system is built around a Renesas S7G2 high-performance MCU, as is shown in Fig. 1. The microcontroller unit consists of a 240 MHz ARM Cortex-M4 embedded processor with a 4 MB flash memory and a 640 KB SRAM. Furthermore it is provided with a 512 MB serial flash, a 256 MB SDRAM memory, and an additional microSD card slot. The three-axis acceleration sensor and the two-axis gyroscope supply information with regard to the position and movement of the Board. These sensors can be activated via an SPI connection. Further sensors mounted on the Arrow ARIS Board are a thermal sensor and a humidity sensor that can be activated via the I²C interface to supply further ambient data. In order to optimally process the data collected by the sensors, a strong focus was directed on the

communication and connectivity of the device. This has enabled the ARIS Board to now also communicate with its environment in a wireless fashion via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.1/4.2), and NFC, in addition to its means of communication via Ethernet 10/100 or a USB connection. In order to also make it possible for the user to interact with the Board, various user interfaces have been implemented. Via the GPIO interface, LEDs, pushbuttons, and a TFT screen can be accessed. Furthermore a resistive touchscreen is supported via I²C. In order to make the Board an all-purpose tool, it was designed in Arduino layout which also enables the use of extension shields, thus making it possible to implement any conceivable application. Additional functions such as the on-board J-Link debugger, support for crypto bootloaders, and over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates make the development process easier, quicker, and more reliable. The combination of the Arrow ARIS Board and the Renesas Synergy™

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