Nordic-powered rapid prototyping platform enables indoor air quality monitoring applications
Denver, CO-based technology company, Sensor Maestros, has released a rapid prototyping platform designed for indoor air quality monitoring, wireless sensor data-logging, and other IoT applications employing Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity.
The ‘smSENSR-LOGR’ platform has standardised pluggable slots (smBlocks) for plugging-in different I2C, SPI, RF, USB-UART and power management devices. The smBlocks all have standardised pinouts which allow a user to rapidly build a wireless sensor system utilising small form-factor breakout boards. smSENSR-LOGR is Arduino Rev 3-compatible and was designed in particular to mate with Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 DK (development kit) evaluation boards.
Sensor Maestros is initially releasing a firmware project that can be used with the smSENSR-LOGR platform configured for its proprietary ‘IAQ-LOGR’ indoor air quality monitoring/data-logging application. This firmware application will be released as an open-source project on the Zephyr, IAR and Segger Embedded Studio platforms. Additional firmware applications will be released on Zephyr. The IAQ-LOGR firmware operates as a connectable beacon and monitors temperature, humidity, ambient light and CO2 levels, and performs data-logging to a Serial Flash. The firmware is currently targeted for Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52810 and nRF52832 SoCs, and will soon add capability for the Nordic nRF52840 SoC.
Nordic nRF52 Series SoCs supervise sensors
Sensor Maestros employs the Nordic nRF52 Series SoCs to supervise the integrated sensors, while the nRF52840 SoC’s powerful 64 MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 processor will be able to support the Floating Point (FP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) computations typical of high-end wireless applications.
“Nordic’s nRF52810, nRF52832, and next in line the nRF52840, provide outstanding low power operation in a connectable beacon and a well structured and easy-to-use software development platform in Zephyr,” explains Franks Roberts II, the owner/founder of Sensor Maestros.
The nRF2 Series SoCs also provide the Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity enabling configuration and control of the IAQ-LOGR application (and each individual sensor) from the user’s iOS/Android smartphone via the associated ‘SENSR-LOGR’ app, as well as rapid over-the-air device firmware update (OTA-DFU) capability. The app provides real-time graphing and allows the user to wirelessly configure the advertising rate, individual sensor sampling rate, and the data-logging interval.
Outstanding performance and Bluetooth LE throughput
“We chose the Nordic nRF52 Series SoCs for the smSENSR-LOGR platform due to the chips’ low power operation and excellent cost-to-performance ratio, as well as the clean implementation enabling efficient Bluetooth LE connectivity,” says Roberts. “The nRF52832, nRF52810 and nRF52840 all provide outstanding Bluetooth LE throughput when the IAQ-LOGR application connects to the SENSR-LOGR app while downloading the logs files.
“Overall, Nordic offers outstanding low power wireless solutions and support. The Nordic software development kits [SDKs] and the current Zephyr platform have always been very well supported and simple to use, and the availability of reference designs makes it easy to develop products for use with the nRF52 DK platform and Nordic silicon.”
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