Electronic components distributors continue to beef up their Internet of Things (IoT) offerings in response to engineers’ demand for solutions that ease the design process and speed time to market. Some of the most recent products to hit the market come from Newark element14 and Avnet Inc.
Newark element14 announced the launch of the industry’s first all-in-one mangOH Green Open Hardware Platform for Industrial IoT applications earlier this month. The platform allows developers to test and prototype ideas quickly and take IoT solutions to market within weeks, the company said. A sensor-to-cloud platform, it provides an all-in-one hardware, software, and cloud-based solution for industrial IoT applications.
At the heart of the board are two industrial-grade CF3 connectors that allow the use of either an AirPrime HL Series module or an AirPrime WP Series applications processor module from Sierra Wireless. The AirPrime WP Series cellular modem provides the device-to-cloud architecture that lets IoT developers build a Linux-based product on a single module.
“The goal of the mangOH Green design is to remove the hardware complexity associated with prototyping IoT connected devices,” said Andrew Suttle, vice president, global distribution, OEM solutions at Sierra Wireless. “We are excited that Newark element14 has adopted the open source design and is manufacturing and selling the industrial-grade boards globally.”
Avnet furthered its IoT capabilities with the introduction of its MicroZed Industrial IoT Starter Kit that includes technology from IBM, Wind River, and Xilinx. The “out-of-the-box” system is designed to simplify customers’ prototype and development efforts as well as provide an easy and quick transition to production, the company said.
The platform is based on Avnet’s MicroZed system-on-module (SoM) with a Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC from Xilinx and pluggable sensor solutions from Maxim Integrated and STMicroelectronics. The kit integrates IBM’s Watson IoT Platform agent on top of a custom-configured, certified image of the Wind River Pulsar Linux operating system, now standard on MicroZed and PicoZed system-on-modules. Using a standard MQTT messaging protocol, IBM’s Watson IoT Platform agent allows registered, secure connection to the Watson IoT Platform and additional cloud services and applications from the IBM Bluemix portfolio.
“The market for IoT-connected systems is exploding, but ensuring that all the pieces of an edge-to-enterprise solution work properly requires a broad range of technologies and expertise,” said Eric Williams, vice president, Internet of Things, Avnet, Inc. “Avnet has done much of the integration from sensor data collection to cloud connectivity, saving IoT developers months of effort, while giving them a superior foundation for building and producing truly differentiated IoT-enabled, industrial processing systems.”
The news comes on top of similar announcements from Avnet earlier this spring, and also follows the appointment of Williams as the company’s first IoT executive.
