Sustainability and Security

As a new year dawns, it’s time to take inventory of all the priorities that we identified last year and determine whether we fulfilled the promises we made to ourselves. I mention this because this month’s feature, “Smart Home Lock Down,” examines the latest efforts to instill sustainability and security in the embedded design world.

Although the theme of this month’s feature topic was consumer electronics, I found it to be an extremely broad category. Searching for hot trends here provides some difficulty in narrowing down the choices. But finding a thread to guide the story became easier once the topics of sustainability and security surfaced. In this feature, you will find the latest efforts by Powercast to make IoT systems more sustainable by reducing battery dependence. And then the story turns to Matter, the wireless communication standard that enables developers to add security to IoT devices, according to Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer with Infineon Technologies.

Have you, as a developer, given the appropriate priority to security and sustainability in system design? Is it worth revisiting the promises made in 2024 to determine if goals were achieved, or is more focus on the subject required in 2025? Perhaps your priorities to improve system design lie elsewhere, but sustainability and security are given their due here to kick off the new year.
Perhaps system performance will be a design objective in 2025. In that case, returning writer Pedro Bertoleti provides an update on Linux performance bottlenecks and how to eliminate them. After all, performance is the key metric by which end users evaluate a new system. It’s best to leave a very good first impression.

If ultra-low power is one of the leading priorities, then the datasheet on this issue examines nine MCUs from industry vendors. You will see selections from Analog Devices, Infineon, Microchip, NXP, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics, and others to deliver the lowest microamps per megahertz.
Whenever a new design calls for a unique enclosure or distinctively shaped printed circuit board, finding a pre-made selection is not always easy or inexpensive. Matt Oppenheim tells us how to create a custom PCB using a CNC milling machine and KiCad, CopperCAM, and Candle software.
Then, there are those pesky circuits that require input from the real world. Wolfgang Matthes offers the second part of a three-part article series on Basic Pulse Circuits. He dives into enabling flip-flops, timing parameters and synchronization, and design tasks needed to capture, detect, and filter pulses.

The beginning of a new year could also be perfect for fine-tuning hardware hacking skills. Colin Flynn shows us how a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico and a TP-Link Tapo C200 smart IP camera could become the next automated bird deterrent or a home automation server.

Also, all those custom IoT gadgets built and installed over the years have served you well in your home automation scheme, using a PC or smartphone as the interface. But can you control them with voice commands over Amazon Alexa? Brian Millier shows us how to integrate IoT gadgets with Amazon Echo by using emulation to receive spoken alarms.

Issue Table of Contents can be found here,
as articles are made available online they will be linked.

PUBLISHED IN CIRCUIT CELLAR MAGAZINE • January #414 – Get a PDF of the issue

Thomas Murphy

Former Editor-in-Chief at Circuit Cellar |  + postsBio

Tom Murphy has been plying his trade as a technology journalist for more than 25 years, first as an editor/writer/reporter and then as a communications professional. He has earned industry recognition for both journalistic endeavors and technology campaigns. Before joining Circuit Cellar magazine as editor-in-chief (2024), Tom wrote tech briefs, newsletters, blogs, press releases, white papers, and technical articles for numerous clients, primarily in the semiconductor industry. His introduction into the industry came as an editor for “Electronic News” covering microprocessor companies, the fabless semiconductor phenomena, communication chips, and many others. When he’s not tapping away at the keyboard, Tom learns Dungeons and Dragons terminology from his 10-year-old daughter and walks his bulldog (slowly) around the block.

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