IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - April 2017 - 62

The selection of a board or
platform for prototyping a DIY
IoT application, project, or
product is a critical step.
have come up with intriguing IoT projects such as Baby Room
Home Automation [39] and HomeController [40].

SAMSUNG'S ARTiK
Samsung has debuted in the IoT domain with three modules:
Artik 1, Artik 5, and Artik 10 (Figure 10), which come in different sizes. Although development boards are available for them,
the modules can also be directly deployed to develop a target
product. The tiniest one, the Artik 1, comes in a 12-mm ×
12-mm package and runs with a coin cell battery. It has a dualcore processor running at 250 MHz and 80 MHz, Bluetooth LE
4.0, an accelerometer, and a nine-axis motion sensor [41]. The
Artik 5 comes with an ARM A7 dual-core 1-GHz processor,
Bluetooth BLE, ZigBee, and 47 GPIO pins, with SPI, PWM,
UART, I2C, and USB interfaces. It supports Arduino/Java/C/
C++ as development environments. It also has a hardware video
codec supporting various standards [42].

FIGURE 9. A UDOO QUAD platform. (Photo courtesy of UDOO.)

The top module is the Artik 10, which comes with ARM
A15x4@1.3 GHz + A7x4@1.0 GHz processors with 2 GB of
LPDDR3 + 16 GB eMMC memory in a package size of just
39 mm × 29 mm × 3.5 mm. It comes with a Yocto 1.6 (Fedora) OS and hardware audio and video codec for various standards. It has 51 GPIO pins with SPI, inter-IC sound (I2S),
I2C, UART, USB, Bluetooth Low Energy, and many more
interfaces. It also backs Open GL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0, DirectX 11,
and Google RenderScript for graphics processing units [43].
Artik development boards are available on the market. Many
tutorials, such as MQTT Message Broker and web page interfaces to Edge devices, can be found on the maker's website
[44]. Citizens are also contributing to solving the California
water crisis by making use of Artik development boards [45].

SELECTING THE OPTIMUM PLATFORM
OR BOARD FOR IOT APPLICATIONS
Turning ideas into a concrete plan is the first step in an IoT
project. Therefore, the selection of a board or platform for prototyping a DIY IoT application, project, or product is a critical
step. In broad terms, three things must be taken into account in
this regard: 1) specifications, 2) open API, and 3) open hardware. The project's specifications play a vital role in the selection of the hardware platform to be used for a particular IoT
application. One must consider fundamental aspects such as the
processor/microcontroller, clock speed, GPIO, ADC/DAC, connectivity (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Ethernet), communication (e.g.,
I2C, UART, and SPI), and, last but not least, the price of the
hardware board to be selected. A prior brainstorming session
for the selection of a platform with a certain set of specifications for a particular application is always recommended.
Afterward, the key aspect that comes into play is Open API.
To avoid being locked, it is essential for a DIYer to select an
IoT solution that comes with open standards, community
support, and open libraries. The use of readily available open
libraries and support enables a DIYer to develop applications
in less time with better resource utilization and efficiency,
which is reflected in the overall development life cycle of a
particular application.
Finally, there is open hardware, which becomes considerably important when someone has accomplished the initial
prototyping and is ready to transform
the project into a product. For marketed applications, one needs to design
a customized, cost-effective hardware
solution. A platform with open schematics and hardware support is always
handy in developing an application and
deploying the product. The specifications of the above-discussed boards are
compared and depicted in Tables 1-3.

IoT SOFTWARE
(a)

(b)

(c)

FIGURE 10. (a) The Artik 1, (b) Artik 5, and (c) Artik 10 modules. (Photo courtesy of Samsung.)
62 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

APRIL 2017

Once a hardware platform has been
selected, the next step is choosing the
application software. The wide range of

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - April 2017