Today, Silicon Labs kicked off its first-ever smart home developer event, Works With 2020, featuring industry experts and leading engineers sharing the latest in smart home technology development. Works With is the first of its kind to host developers and ecosystem partners, delivering 40 engineering-led session and 15 workshops to aid developers with designing, prototyping, and getting their products to market. When Silicon Labs imagined Works With, it wasn’t envisioned as a livestreamed event, but shifting to virtual allowed more than 5,000 developers from all over the world to participate.

Day 1 Recap - It’s All About Connections

Opening Keynote

Silicon Labs CEO, Tyson Tuttle, kicked off the event by diving into Silicon Labs’ vision to build a smarter, more connected world. With the current global pandemic, now more than ever, people are depending on IoT technology to stay connected – to work, to fun, and to each other. The creative ideas of developers are key to the success of the smart home industry.

Tyson went on to speak about Works With being the “Smart Home Hub” – a place where major platform players, protocol experts, and alliance partners unite to help developers navigate smart home technology. The event is designed to bring together all developers, no matter their level of expertise, and provide the know-how and best practices to get certified smart home products to market quicker. Tyson welcomed Silicon Labs IoT SVP and GM Matt Johnson to the keynote stage where he spoke to Grant Erickson, Jim Kitchen, and Joshua Danovitz, who are leading efforts at their respective companies, Google, Comcast, and Amazon, to pioneer a smoother development journey and break through the standards fragmentation in order to bring new and differentiated features to consumers.

Technical Sessions

After the keynote, attendees broke out into a variety of technical sessions, including workshops on designing products that work with Amazon, Google, HomeKit, and Samsung SmartThings ecosystems. During the sessions, developers had the opportunity to hear directly from engineering experts about the latest and greatest in smart home development. The sessions also gave developers the opportunity to learn how to acquire industry-recognized certifications for their products.

Panel – Building an Ecosystem IoT Developers Will Love

During lunch, technology journalist and IoT thought-leader Stacey Higginbotham (of Stacey on IoT) hosted a panel with leaders from NXP, ADT, Philips Hue, Ikea and Assa Abloy where they discussed how the smart home industry is coming together and how it will continue to evolve.

The panel discussed at length the emphasis on matters related to security and user experience, and one of the main points was the focus on leveraging the IP investment companies have already made. Being able to use existing IP bearing networks and shifting development resources to focus on actually innovating on new features that add value and simplify adoption for consumers.

Panelists also touched on some of the biggest obstacles developers face in bringing their products to market, including the effort required to support so many different protocols and delivering consistent user experiences across brands. Answering these challenges will provide developers with the confidence to build new, more sophisticated feature sets that create better experiences and simplify adoption.

Works With 2020 Announcements

In the midst of all of the Works With buzz and excitement, we made two major announcements – the launch of a new Simplicity Studio and BGM220.

Simplicity Studio 5 is a major upgrade to our Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), leveraging our industry leading IoT wireless expertise. Simplicity Studio 5 offers the same access and developer experience across a wide range of wireless protocols, all within a central web-style user interface. The software platform is scalable to multiple protocols including OpenThread, making it simpler to develop IPv6 based mesh applications and paving the way for future development of Project Connected Home over IP-based devices running on our EFR32 Wireless Gecko. Learn more about Simplicity Studio 5.

BGM220, combines our award-winning BG22 Bluetooth system-on-chip (SoC) devices, a pre-certified module and production-ready firmware with an on-board Bluetooth stack, application layer, and secure boot-loading functionality. Bluetooth Xpress BGX220P/S provides complete IoT solutions with framework libraries, making it easier and faster for developers to create new apps, with no Bluetooth expertise necessary. Click here for more information about BGM220.

What’s On Deck for Day 2

After a full day of learning and great conversations, we’re excited to give you a sneak peak of what to expect tomorrow. Join Silicon Labs Senior Vice President and General Manager for IoT, Matt Johnson, as he sits down with Jamie Siminoff, Founder and Chief Inventor of Ring. Jamie will share his story of creating what is now a dominant name in Wi-Fi-enabled video doorbells. His story is one of tenacity and patience, and his vision for Ring’s future after being acquired by Amazon is as ambitious as it is promising. You can catch the Day 2 Keynote on Thursday, September 10, at 9:00 a.m. CDT. Click here to register.

After the keynote, we have a cornucopia of how-to sessions including workshops on LED-bulb , door lock and sensor product development, energy harvesting, home automation, environmental sensing and more. Our From Chip to Cloud: Building the Whole Product session will answer questions about commissioning, security and authentication to front-end and back-end application interfaces. You can also join our sessions on IoT security, covering the need for the development of security requirements tailored to each vertical device type. Build out your Day 2 agenda here. We look forward to seeing you there! If you can’t make the live stream you can watch replays here.

For consumers, commercial and automotive engineers, and their peers on Internet of Things (IoT) design teams, developing IoT applications is exciting, hard work. Challenges and opportunities abound, from sourcing, connecting, and cleaning data; prioritizing applications for exploration; to building new solutions to solve critical pain points; and scaling efforts using industry platforms. Consumer IoT has obviously set the pace with connected home applications, with commercial and automotive IoT following the lead. Now, the rollout of 5G will make these sacrifices worthwhile. By offering high-speed connectivity, 5G will allow IoT to achieve lift-off, opening the door to decades of dazzling innovation to come.

To understand cross-industry plans for IoT, TE Connectivity (TE) conducted an IoT market survey, receiving 180 responses from primarily senior engineers. Here’s what they said:

5G solves critical challenges, enabling companies to capture diverse types of data and move data faster. These advances, paired with lower consumption IoT devices and miniaturized components, will open the door to more applications over time.

More innovation is needed, with 57% of engineers seeking greater hardware endurance advances, 52% wanting to tie measurement accuracy with measurement stability, 46% needing better sensor intelligence, 31% looking to boost processing speeds, and 16% hoping to leverage cloud analytics.

Three issues predominate with solution design, with 49% citing finding the right hardware and connectivity as challenges to address, while 44% cited ensuring effective security as a leading requirement.

Solution design begins with hardware, with 78% of engineers specifying hardware first, and only 22% beginning with software.

TE Connectivity stands ready to help you with your IoT application. We provide a wide array of sensor solutions and data connectivity products to help you capture and transmit data at high speeds to unlock the power of the connected world.

To help you with your IoT journey and solution consideration, we have created the following resources:

• IoT sensor market survey video: Get insights into what your peers think and prioritize with IoT development. Watch the video.
• What’s the Protocol? This easy-to-use infographic helps you explore the five wireless protocols you could use for your next IoT application – Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Lower Energy (LE), Zigbee, LoRaWAN (LPWAN), and Narrowband IoT – NB-IoT (LPWAN). With one glance, you can assess the ideal applications, data rate, security, cost, standards, range, and power consumption associated with each protocol. Download the infographic now.
• Predictive Maintenance with Vibration Sensors: Automation is driving demand for accelerometers in high-volume, smaller systems. While most industrial devices are engineered to operate smoothly, vibration can often be a leading indicator of deterioration in heavy equipment. In this article, get technical guidance on vibration specification parameters to ensure accurate, reliable performance for your industrial condition monitoring and preventive maintenance applications. Read the white paper.
• Analog and Digital Transducers – the Advantages of Both: Sensors and transducers have evolved from purely analog operations to digital protocols, signal processing, and interfaces. However, design engineers need both. Learn how TE’s M3200 expands choices for you. Get the white paper.

The rapid development of technologies such as 5G and the IoT offer greater openness and the need for businesses to expand their capabilities. Collaboration is often a path forward to gaining the speed, and scale companies seek.

TE is ready to support you with insight, IoT experience, and a broad sensor portfolio to power your IoT applications. Contact us today to get started.

This summer we invited two high school students, Ian and Cade, to spend a couple of weeks getting to know Thunderboard Sense. Here they summarize what happened when they applied the sensor-to-cloud development kit to the game of tennis. 

Who We Are

Our names are Ian Wood and Cade Nowicki and we are two high school interns from the central Texas area. Our task was to find an activity or object that could be enhanced or improved by the Thunderboard Sense IoT Development Starter Kit (for example, using the heat temperature sensors to find your daily weather).

Our Project        

With this basic information, we wanted to do something fun and related to a summertime activity. With this in mind we decided to use tennis as our topic. We placed the Thunderboard Sense, which has a variety of sensors, on a tennis racket to see how different environmental factors and position of the athlete affect performance. Since the Thunderboard Sense gathers all kinds of data relating to the environment and position, we were pretty sure it could help us answer our question. 

What We Found

We produced a variety of results during our experiments. The most fascinating was when we discovered that as UV increased, the amount of acceleration measured also increased. The two are directly proportional. The graphs below shows one with a UV of 0 and another with a UV of 9. The graph on the left show a slight change in acceleration while the graph on the right displays a more dramatic change in acceleration.

Since the main difference between the two environments was UV, we can conclude that as UV increases so does the acceleration. Even though other environmental factors changed between the two trials, we believe that the change in UV is more likely to be the main difference because most other environmental factors changed very little as shown below in the spreadsheet.

The change in the Z axis, shown in the graphs, is us swinging the racket while the x and y axis is the angle of our hand position and body orientation.

How the Thunderboard was Beneficial

The Thunderboard Sense gave us the chance to learn more about how the future and technology is becoming more cohesive. Our experience using the Thunderboard Sense also gave us insight into the real world of electronics giving us students an idea of how technology is making the world a more connected place.

Thunderboard Sense

The chip in general was incredible! The size of the chip for the amount of sensors it had was amazing. This product was great when we tested our idea for the chip because it was capable of doing so many tasks, the use of the Thunderboard is seemingly endless. This task we were given has taught us so much about real life projects and it gave us a glimpse of what our futures may hold.

Check out their video recap below:

About Cade and Ian

Cade Nowicki attends Dripping Springs High School in Dripping Springs Texas. He's interested in the engineering field and participates in his school's F1 competition, where a team designs and markets a mini F1 car. The team recently attended Nationals where they got some real world experience with engineering, but nothing like his experience with Thunderboard Sense.

Ian Wood is a junior at James Bowie High School in Austin, Texas. He's also interested in engineering and plans to study it in college. Before his internship at Silicon Labs, he had little experience in real-world project management, but after this summer has a better understanding of how to schedule and manage projects.

We recently spoke with CEO Marina Nikeschina of e-Senses and Pim van der Meer, project lead development at HYB, a fresh team on the IoT scene that just celebrated its first birthday. e-Senses is focused on health and wellness and is determined to help people achieve the vitamin D levels they need in a way that’s never been done before - with a cutting-edge ring.

For folks just now hearing about you, tell us about your business; how did you get started?

Well, our original inspiration was actually due to a friend of the founders who had concerns about elderly patients. Essentially, in his research he realized that light had a profound effect on happiness and quality of life in the individuals he saw. Seniors who get outside are eating better, sleeping better, virtually everything better than people who stay inside. Older patients who are aren’t going outside, they get depressed, they get sick.

So he asked if it was possible to make something that you can put on people to see how much light they receive. Troubleshooting this idea, we realized that the only two parts of our body typically not completely covered in clothes as the seasons come and go are our face and hands. So we decided to make a ring, because a ring is one accessory that’s unisex and just not really intrusive for people to adopt. That’s how our Helios Smart Ring was born, and it’s the first vitamin D tracker in the world.

Starting out, we decided to look at a lot of medical studies about light, vitamin D, and sunlight. And we were surprised to learn about the many advantages you can get for free from the sunlight. So we ultimately decided to make a very serious product, not just a small, simple tool to measure basic light exposure, but a wearable device for everyone.

And we designed a corresponding app that helps breathe life into the data the ring collects; it has three modes or “coaches.” Mode one is a “Vitamin D Coach” that shows how much vitamin D you are absorbing every day from the sun by the minute. Mode two is the “Sunlight Coach” that helps measure the strength of the sun and tells you how long you can stay outside without any danger. Then we have a “Daylight Coach” mode that calculates the minimum amount of light that you need every day and displays in percentages how far along you are for your daily goal.

Tell us about some of the challenges you faced in developing such a small device. I know you had to hit some hurdles getting this much functionality out of such a small, unobtrusive object.

I would say we faced two main challenges in development. The first challenge was how to charge the device. The first prototypes used contact points for charging, but the low pressure on the charging pins that the limited weight of the ring gives will result in bad contact due to corrosion of the contact points. So we retooled the ring to have its own charging coil inside and make the charging process exclusively wireless, eliminating that issue entirely.

Secondly, achieving a long battery life was challenging. Our initial goal was to have at least a 24-hour battery life, but our initial prototypes were only holding a four- to six-hour charge. That obviously wasn’t acceptable to us. After what could only be described as a bout of sheer obsession to solve this problem, a very talented engineer got the battery life up to two to three days of wear, which we’re really pleased with because of the ease of use that grants our users. 

Well, we think this is a really amazing health application. Can you also tell us what Silicon Labs products are you using in the Helios and why?
We are using the Si1133 in the Helios Smart Ring. It was very difficult to find components for our recent circuit board because we were looking for the smallest components in the world. A ring is such a small form factor and you want durability as well. Everything we are using is the smallest, smallest, smallest. But we didn't want to compromise on quality. We were looking for sensors that can measure daylight and sunlight accurately, and that were small, light, and production-ready. We came across Silicon Labs’ solution and knew this was our winner.

In your view, what does the future of IoT look like in the next 5–8 years given your experience?

It’s obviously been amazing to witness how widespread the IoT has become now that network and power solutions have evolved to allow so many product designs actually come to life. That said, what we most hope to see is that we don’t overly automate the human experience itself. Such as with the Smart Home concept, it’s great that you can open and close a window and control a thermostat remotely—those are things that can save energy costs and add a level of convenience that is enriching for an end-user. But there is no reason to automate someone’s blankets being rolled off of them in the morning or every other small detail of every daily routine in life. We hope that the IoT’s biggest gains will be rooted in truly enriching people’s lives and health in ways that can matter the most.

We recently spoke with CEO Marina Nikeschina of e-Senses and Pim van der Meer, project lead development at HYB, a fresh team on the IoT scene that just celebrated its first birthday. e-Senses is focused on health and wellness and is determined to help people achieve the vitamin D levels they need in a way that’s never been done before - with a cutting-edge ring.

For folks just now hearing about you, tell us about your business; how did you get started?

Well, our original inspiration was actually due to a friend of the founders who had concerns about elderly patients. Essentially, in his research he realized that light had a profound effect on happiness and quality of life in the individuals he saw. Seniors who get outside are eating better, sleeping better, virtually everything better than people who stay inside. Older patients who are aren’t going outside, they get depressed, they get sick.

So he asked if it was possible to make something that you can put on people to see how much light they receive. Troubleshooting this idea, we realized that the only two parts of our body typically not completely covered in clothes as the seasons come and go are our face and hands. So we decided to make a ring, because a ring is one accessory that’s unisex and just not really intrusive for people to adopt. That’s how our Helios Smart Ring was born, and it’s the first vitamin D tracker in the world.

Starting out, we decided to look at a lot of medical studies about light, vitamin D, and sunlight. And we were surprised to learn about the many advantages you can get for free from the sunlight. So we ultimately decided to make a very serious product, not just a small, simple tool to measure basic light exposure, but a wearable device for everyone.

And we designed a corresponding app that helps breathe life into the data the ring collects; it has three modes or “coaches.” Mode one is a “Vitamin D Coach” that shows how much vitamin D you are absorbing every day from the sun by the minute. Mode two is the “Sunlight Coach” that helps measure the strength of the sun and tells you how long you can stay outside without any danger. Then we have a “Daylight Coach” mode that calculates the minimum amount of light that you need every day and displays in percentages how far along you are for your daily goal.

Tell us about some of the challenges you faced in developing such a small device. I know you had to hit some hurdles getting this much functionality out of such a small, unobtrusive object.

I would say we faced two main challenges in development. The first challenge was how to charge the device. The first prototypes used contact points for charging, but the low pressure on the charging pins that the limited weight of the ring gives will result in bad contact due to corrosion of the contact points. So we retooled the ring to have its own charging coil inside and make the charging process exclusively wireless, eliminating that issue entirely.

Secondly, achieving a long battery life was challenging. Our initial goal was to have at least a 24-hour battery life, but our initial prototypes were only holding a four- to six-hour charge. That obviously wasn’t acceptable to us. After what could only be described as a bout of sheer obsession to solve this problem, a very talented engineer got the battery life up to two to three days of wear, which we’re really pleased with because of the ease of use that grants our users. 

Well, we think this is a really amazing health application. Can you also tell us what Silicon Labs products are you using in the Helios and why?
We are using the Si1133 in the Helios Smart Ring. It was very difficult to find components for our recent circuit board because we were looking for the smallest components in the world. A ring is such a small form factor and you want durability as well. Everything we are using is the smallest, smallest, smallest. But we didn't want to compromise on quality. We were looking for sensors that can measure daylight and sunlight accurately, and that were small, light, and production-ready. We came across Silicon Labs’ solution and knew this was our winner.

In your view, what does the future of IoT look like in the next 5–8 years given your experience?

It’s obviously been amazing to witness how widespread the IoT has become now that network and power solutions have evolved to allow so many product designs actually come to life. That said, what we most hope to see is that we don’t overly automate the human experience itself. Such as with the Smart Home concept, it’s great that you can open and close a window and control a thermostat remotely—those are things that can save energy costs and add a level of convenience that is enriching for an end-user. But there is no reason to automate someone’s blankets being rolled off of them in the morning or every other small detail of every daily routine in life. We hope that the IoT’s biggest gains will be rooted in truly enriching people’s lives and health in ways that can matter the most.