IoT strengthens components market growth

The rapidly evolving and growing smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) market will spark incredible growth in the electronic components market. Eric Lee, Head of Regional Technical Marketing Asia Pacific at RS Components, shares his views on opportunities and trends for 2015.

An increasing number of machines, smart mobile devices and household objects are wirelessly connecting to one another and to the internet. Market research firms predict that tens of billions of devices, each with its own unique IP address, will be connected to the internet by the turn of the decade.

There has been an increase in public interest, press coverage, start-ups and business strategies built around the IoT. The rise of IoT has also given a boost to the smart home technology market. Gartner’s predictions showed that by 2022, the adoption of smart homes in developed countries is set to rise exponentially. According to Pew Research, 83% of technology experts and engaged internet users agreed that IoT and wearables would have widespread and beneficial effects by 2025. Furthermore, the lowered development costs of sensors and communications functions in consumer products will spur the industry towards greater heights.

Electronic components, the foundational building block of smart homes, will be a key driver in this development. In Australia, the smart home market is expected to reach $917 million by 2017; and in the APAC region, the revenue growth of smart homes is expected to reach $9.23 billion by 2020.

Smart homes and components

Smart homes, as the name suggests, is the connection of electronics with facilities that we use at home in our everyday lives with some degree of intelligence to provide convenience. For example, a highly effective network of sensors and processors to manage our residential facilities and family chores, so as to make our homes safer, more convenient, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing and environmentally friendly.

Imagine this scenario: On the way to work in the morning, a user hits the ‘departure’ button before leaving the house - this turns off the lights, air conditioner and floor heating functions, and switches the home to ‘unoccupied’ mode. As the sun strengthens, the light sensors beside the windows will scroll different sets of curtains to balance the needed sunshade onto the living room and maintain the lighting balance. In the evening, just as the user is about to return home, s/he hits the ‘go home’ button on a mobile phone app, which automatically restarts the functions that were previously shut down.

Factors such as cabling technology, network communication technology, smart home system design solutions, security technology, automatic control technology, audio and video technology, and the electronic technology and end-user devices related to smart homes all form a collective information processing hub. The sensing, data transmission and data processing functions in this hub involve extensive use of electronics components. In fact, smart homes are the ultimate result of the development of IoT, and electronic components form the most important nodes used to create this connected network.

Aiding development with components

Forming this increasingly intelligent IP-based network are trillions of sensors, billions of microcontrollers and millions of gateways right up to the cloud computing data servers and intelligent systems that handle ‘big data’. The IoT can enable countless intelligent and controllable applications in building and home automation, such as smart lighting systems, or smart grids for power and water, or in industrial systems, or in automotive and transportation markets. One example is home lighting, where it is cost-prohibitive to wire up control signals to individual lamps in every room in a house; the deployment of low-power sensors and actuators, wireless microcontrollers and the use of low-power wireless communications can enable smart, controllable and customisable lighting schemes.

Low-power wireless connectivity is key to this development: the 2.4 GHz ZigBee mesh network protocol, for example, has been widely adopted in machine-to-machine (M2M) applications and allows nodes to be easily added to a network, linking to a gateway device for low-data-rate (250 Kbps) links. The latest version of the protocol, ZigBee IP, moves to the IPv6 standard and allows the sensor nodes to be accessed directly from the internet. In addition, the Green Power version of ZigBee allows devices to be easily powered by energy harvesting. Another growing standard is the Weightless protocol that uses TV white-space frequencies and has been developed specifically for M2M applications. There are also new lower power versions of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (Bluetooth low energy - LE) in varying states of readiness for development. Bluetooth LE has already seen acceptance in consumer markets and is likely to be an important technology to deliver longer battery life for wearable devices, for example.

Crucial to the IoT are low-power microcontrollers such as ARM Cortex microprocessor-based MCUs from silicon vendors such as Freescale, NXP, ST, TI and many others. For example, the latest Gecko microcontrollers from Silicon Labs use specially developed low-power modes, so that the controllers wait for a signal from the sensors before starting up, sending the data and shutting down again. These devices are being optimised for sensor networks or smart-grid power applications with batteries that run from 3.3 V and can run for 10-20 years. The power consumption is so low that the MCUs can be powered from solar cells or even via RF or thermal energy from the surrounding environment, negating the need for batteries.

Further enabling engineers in the development of IoT applications are development platforms such as mbed, Arduino and Raspberry Pi, just to name a few, which are now offering expanding connectivity options including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There are also different types of sensors and analog components covering temperature, motion, gyroscope and lighting to provide circumstantial intelligence.

The mbed microcontrollers are a series of ARM-based development boards designed for fast, flexible and low-risk professional rapid prototyping. Packaged as a small 40-pin 0.1″ DIP form-factor convenient for prototyping with solderless breadboard, stripboard and through-hole PCBs, they include a built-in USB programming interface that is as simple as using a USB flash drive.

The mbed application development board includes a host of connectors and external interfaces such as mini-USB, LCD display, built-in temperature sensor and variable PWM frequency knob, thus eliminating the requirement for add-on boards and reducing valuable design time for engineers. Users have the option to plug in an LPC1768 Cortex M0 or M3 processor module to connect smart nodes through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Both the application board and the processor module are available from RS Components.

Arduino, on the other hand, is an open-source software and hardware electronics prototyping platform intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. The latest Arduino TRE combines a Texas Instruments 1 GHz Sitara AM335x processor and an Atmel 16 MHz ATmega32u4 AVR microcontroller to deliver the highest performance board currently available for the Arduino developer community, while also leveraging the simplicity of the Arduino software experience.

Integration of the 1 GHz Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 based processor in the Arduino TRE means developers can obtain up to 100 times more performance than with the Arduino Leonardo or Uno, for example. This level of performance opens up new possibilities, including the ability to develop advanced Linux-powered applications such as high-performance desktop applications, processing-intensive algorithms or high-speed communications.

Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi is a small, powerful computer and development board to help educate a new generation of programmers and electronics engineers. Developed by the Raspberry Pi foundation, the Raspberry Pi computer is a miniature ARM-based PC that can do many of the things a desktop PC can do like word processing, games or playing back high-definition video.

The latest Raspberry Pi Model A+ has the 40-pin GPIO connector introduced on the Model B+, with the same pin-out and mounting holes for standard Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) accessories, allowing users to add extra functions quickly and easily. With smaller board dimensions of 65 x 56 mm, the Raspberry Pi Model A+ is easily embeddable and suited to mobile or battery-powered applications.

Finally, yet importantly, the SparqEE CELLv1.0 is a tiny development board that can also connect to the Arduino and Raspberry Pi via plug-in daughter cards or ‘shields’. It provides wireless connectivity worldwide via 2G/3G cellular technology. Shipped with a global 3G SIM card that delivers worldwide coverage, SparqEE CELLv1.0 board users will be able to log in to a website and use their credit card to buy data or set up a direct debit for ongoing data usage. The increase in range permitted by cellular communications enables a number of potential applications for developers and is ideal for ‘small data’ projects that need to operate over very long distances, even potentially to another country or continent. Suitable projects are likely to be sensor-based low-bandwidth-data projects that will send low amounts of data over the internet.

It is apparent that the intense reliance on device interconnectivity of a smart home has created unprecedented opportunities for the electronics industry. Challenges and opportunities will always coexist but for electronics distributors, building up their product mix and unique services will help capture a dominant share of the growing IoT market