Your next issue of Circuit Cellar is coming next week! Here’s a sneak look at what’s coming up in January Circuit Cellar. Embedded technologies solutions for COVID-19, data acquisition, COM Express boards, LoRa air-quality project, MCU-based fruit ripeness detector, EMFI analysis, Tiny display subsystem project and more! This 84-page magazine spreads out a delicious table of embedded technology articles for your reading consumption.
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Here’s a sneak preview of January 2020 Circuit Cellar:
TECHNOLOGIES SERVING WORLDWIDE ISSUES
Embedded Solutions Address COVID-19
By Jeff Child
From medical monitoring portables to wearable social distance alarms to store occupancy counters, a whole range of embedded devices have emerged to serve the demands of the COVID-19 era. System designers are leveraging the latest microcontroller, sensor and wireless technologies to build their COVID-19 devices. Circuit Cellar’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Child, looks at the key technology and product trends associated with these embedded designs.
LoRa Air Quality Monitoring System
By Dhairya A. Parikh
The degrading quality of air around us remains one of the most serious issues of the 21st century. In this project article, Dhairya designs and builds a long-range and low power air quality monitoring system using various sensors and the popular LoRaWAN communication protocol.
Finding a Billion Dollar Fault Mode with EMFI
By Colin O’Flynn
Claims of improper software design related to the electronic throttle system have cost Toyota several billion dollars in settlements, government fines and other business losses. Yet the exact fault hasn’t been recreated, even though at least one candidate exists in the code. In this article, Colin explores using electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), often used in security analysis, to try and trigger a fault mode in a similar vehicle computer to the one implicated in the Toyota lawsuit.
BOARD-LEVEL EMBEDDED RESOURCES
Datasheet: COM Express Boards
By Jeff Child
COM Express boards provide a complete computing core that can be upgraded when needed, leaving the application-specific I/O on the baseboard. New specifications, like COM-HPC are widening the scope of COM Express’ capabilities. This Datasheet section updates readers on this technology and provides a product album of representative COM Express products.
A Deep Dive on Thunderboard Sense 2: Sensors for a Song
By Brian Millier
Huge growth in the smartphone market has had the side-effect of dramatically lowering the cost and shrinking the size of the sensors used in those phones. Several chip vendors have come out with small development boards containing a variety of these tiny, low-cost sensors. In this article, Brian takes a close look at once such solution: The Thunderboard Sense 2 from Silicon Labs.
Data Acquisition Technology
By Jeff Child
Just as it’s always done, the data acquisition world is adapting the latest and greatest technologies from the general embedded computing industry. Virtualization, AI and IoT are all part of the mix. Circuit Cellar’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Child, dives into the latest technology trends and product developments in data acquisition.
Understanding the Ultra96 Board (Part 2)
By Nishant Mittal
In Part 1 of Nishant’s article series examining the Ultra96-V2—the board based on the 96Boards open specification—he discussed board form factor, design and other aspects of the hardware. In Part 2, Nishant discusses various ways this board can use utilized to convert ideas into reality, such as how to put the Linux OS into action on the Ultra96 board.
PROJECT ARTICLES WITH ALL THE DETAILS
Build a Tiny OLED Display Subsystem
By Jeff Bachiochi
We live in an era where huge display screens are commonplace. But embedded systems often demand small displays, hopefully with low-overhead control electronics. In this project article, Jeff endeavors to design and build a low-cost 128×64 OLED display subsystem using an 8-bit MCU and I2C interfacing.
Build a Solar-Power Weather Station: Using Adafruit IO
By Mark Komus
How is the weather?” In modern times, for a reliable answer to that question, you’re much better off asking a machine than a human. Wouldn’t it be fun to build such a device yourself? With that in mind, in this project article, Mark explains how to build your own hobby weather station that is solar powered, runs over Wi-Fi and logs all its data to Adafruit IO.
Build an Automated Fruit Ripeness Detector
By Christina Chang, Michelle Feng and Russell Silva
Embedded systems can be tasked to do many things that are too tedious for humans. Watching fruit ripen is a good example. In this article, learn how these three Cornell students built a device that uses spectroscopy to track ripeness of a variety of fruits including bananas and oranges. The system uses a TFT display and a Microchip PIC32 MCU.
