#MonthlyWrap-up All You Need to Know: Projectspotlights, New Releases, Manufacturing Tips, and More
Hey community,
Time flies. Here comes our second entry of our Monthly Wrap-ups (Click here to read the first entry). If you’re new to this session, here is a brief intro to it. We have gotten dozens of requests over the years for a Seeed Monthly Newsletter. Although we already have a weekly newsletter for product updates, we still need a place to host overall information about what’s happened on a monthly basis. It can offer an efficient and friendly way to get updated for the whole community.
And that’s what we expect for our Seeed Monthly Wrap-ups. Instead of putting it a subscribe-to-read, we’re publishing them on our blog, keeping it as open and accessible as possible for the whole community. For each entry, we will have Community & Ecosystem, Industrial IoT Solutions, Open Hardware Modules, Customization & Manufacturing, and Seeed Ecosystem as the main sessions to wrap up our updates. These sessions closely correspond with all our core values and businesses.
Now, please enjoy our July Monthly Wrap-up, have a good read.
01 Seeed Community & Ecosystem
This session will embrace some featured projects emerging in the community, and some hottest technical topics at our forum. In this session, we will also include some important updates regarding corporate news and something excited happens in Shenzhen that we would love to share with you.
Ecosystem
Techsmith 01: Open Call for 3 LoRa IoT Application Project Coordinators. Techsmith is a program that aims to be an interface for the community and Seeed to collaborate closely in a sustainable way. For the first entry, we would love to shout out that we are looking for 3 qualified and experienced candidates as LoRa IoT Application Project Coordinators (Part-time/Contract) to working closely with our Industrial Application Group team. Click to learn more & apply.
Meanwhile in Shenzhen
Seeed Products Exhibited as Art in Museum. Some of our open source modules have been displayed in the Values of Design China in the Making Exhibition. It’s curated by Design Society and Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) at Sea World Culture and Arts Center, a design museum in Shenzhen.
Seeed Is Now an Official ST Authorized Partner. We’re excited to announce that Seeed has been authorized by STMicroelectronics as a new member to join the ST Partner ecosystem. Seeed’s partner page is now live on ST’s official website, where some of our products and services are listed. Click to read more.
On June 5th, we celebrated World Environment Day by showing how technology especially IoT plays an important role in Ecosystem restoration. For instance, our #SenseCAP IIoT solution that senses the environment provides data-driven insights to build a sustainable ecosystem (such as smart farming and smart city). Read more.
Video recap of Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) 2018 is out. GOSH 2018 took place in Shenzhen and it has been such a nice memory, and we were honored to offer support for the event as a community partner.
Project Spotlight in June
Intruder Detection Using Ultra-Low Powered Thermal Vision, Wio Terminal, Raspberry Pi Pico by Naveen Kumar. It incorporates TinyML in a TensorFlow Lite Model to detect intruders in the dark with a low-resolution thermal camera! For Data collection for training, Naveen has used Wio Terminal to collect data. The 3 buttons on the Wio Terminal were used to label the 3 classes (Person, Object, and Background). The captured data is saved to the files on an inbuilt micro SD card on the Wio Terminal. Click to get a step-by-step tutorial.
Low-Cost LoRaWan Field Tester by Paul Pinault. When deploying a LoRaWAN network, you might want to know your gateway coverage and measure the radio performance in different places. Especially when deploying a Helium Inc network, you want to know how many Hotspots around can be touched for a given position. Paul made a LoRaWAN Field Tester based on a Wio Terminal and an RFM95, which just helps these out. The idea of this project is to propose a simple tool you can build the field tester. Project tutorial on GitHub.
Cheesoid – The Robot That Smells by Andy Clark. It is a desktop robot in size of a coffee tin, and it can tell difference between cheese and petrol powered by Seeeduino XIAO. You can watch the video of the build on the Element14 community.
Gesture recognition to get started Machine Learning with Wio RP2040 board. With Arduino and Edge Impulse, we train and deploy a simple neural network for classifying paper-rock gestures with just a single light sensor. Why wait? Everyone can get your Wio RP2040 mini Dev Board started with Machine learning at the very edge now. Get started with the full tutorial.
Incorporating GPS and solar power into environmental sensors by Antonio Ruiz. To allow the monitoring of different environmental parameters whilst allowing their mapping in field applications, Antonio Ruiz and his team designed a device that included a solar-powered Wio Terminal, where multiple sensors and a GPS device had been incorporated. The LCD screen on the Wio Terminal, not only allowed a display of the results but could also be used to show in a map the position where the different measurements had been taken. Project Tutorial here.
02 Industrial IoT Solutions
We would love to share our journey of developing and deployment of IIoT solutions, including successful cases, applications, and industry insights.
Case Studies
SenseCAP LoRaWAN Deployed in Environmental Monitoring Projects in Sweden featured by Distrelec Group’s first issue eBook Power Management Systems (PMS). Our dear Violet Su also contributed an entry on how our IIoT devices SenseCAP helps a global leading company to monitor the environment to reduce its impact on the ecosystem. Read the eBook here
Regaltech M Sdn Bhd is a smart farming solution provider to vegetable growers in Malaysia. And we are happy that RegalTech has chosen Seeed IIoT products – SenseCAP LoRaWAN series to monitor environmental data in the greenhouses. With data of light intensity, air temperature, and humidity, etc. accessible, they are able to better control the greenhouse environments for the plants to grow better, and for further study and analysis. To learn more about Regaltech’s solutions, please click.
SenseCAP LoRaWan Digitalized the Agriculture Research in South Africa. Wow, our SenseCAP LoRaWAN devices arrived in South Africa!!! Please do keep us updated on how you and the team apply them to digitalize the agriculture research facilities of the University of Pretoria/Universiteit van Pretoria. Learn more.
Odyssey Blue J4105 Mini PC Application by Janakiram MSV. I used three Mini PC devices to run a highly available Kubernetes cluster based on K3s 1.19. With two Gigabit Ethernet ports, I am planning to split the control plane and data plane traffic. One port will be used for node-to-node communication while the other is will be used for exposing the workloads to the outside world. The Odyssey Blue J4105 Mini PC is my testbed for running cloud-native applications at the edge. I am planning to put this cluster to use for evaluating some of the lightweight Kubernetes distributions such as K3s, MicroK8s, and K0s. By connecting AI accelerators like Intel NCS2 and Google Coral Mini PCIe, the combination of Mini PC hardware and Kubernetes deliver the cloud-native AI stack for the edge. Read more.
New Solutions
Meet reServer, a Powerful Edge Computing System Closer to the Real World. reServer is a powerful edge computing system closer to the real world. Featuring an open modular design, reServer offers developers the freewill to customize it into an edge-computing system specifically for their vertical applications. It supports a list of selectable bear-bone boards to power up the system, including X86, Raspberry Pi, Nvidia Jetson, and RISC-V. With all these technologies onboard, reServer could be turned into a router, a network-attached storage (NAS), a localized AI computing centre, and many other applications that serve the need for edge computing. As the very first series on the reServer roadmap, we add our new ODYSSEY X86 V2 computers to its heart to embrace the x86 architecture. There will be 3 versions in the reServer X86 series powered by the 11th Gen Intel Core i7，i5 and i3. The reServer X86 i3 version is now launched for pre-order. Read more.
Partnerships
Datacake now has templates ready for all our IIoT LoRaWAN SenseCAP Devices including a base template for upcoming devices. Datacake is a multi-purpose, low-code IoT platform that requires no programming skills and minimal time to create custom IoT applications that can be brought into a white label IoT solution at the push of a button. Read more.
Our SenseCAP LoRaWan Wireless sensors and LoRa-E5 Module are now listed on The Things Network! The sensors include Air Temperature and Humidity Sensor, Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensor, Light Intensity Sensor, CO2 Sensor and Barometric Pressure Sensor. Looking forward to work with The Things Network to build an open LoRaWAN® network with SenseCAP devices. Read more.
We’re excited to share that Seeed is joining the Netmore IoT Network as a certified member to archive mass scaling in Europe. Netmore is the leading multi-network IoT operator in Sweden. The collaboration will see Seeed offers SenseCAP LoRaWAN devices in Netmore IoT Market, a platform where software developers and hardware providers can explore and implement IoT projects together. Through the collaboration, Seeed and Netmore will work together to drive the scale of LoRaWAN® for massive IoT. Read more.
03 Open Hardware Modules
New releases, technical updates, and all things worth sharing related to our open modules.
New Releases
New Updates
Brand new Blynk IoT Platform released, with official support for Wio Terminal! We’re excited to partner with Blynk to bring the latest Blynk platform support on Wio Terminal. With Wio Terminal and Blynk, you can: Sense the Real-World data with over 300 Seeed Groves sensors; Easily build TinyML applications with Edge Impulse; Build your program interpreter with an LCD screen and compact enclosure. Click to learn how to connect your Wio Terminal to Blynk new platform.
Courses & Guide
No-Code Programming for Biology Beginner’s Guide by Dr. Stephanie Norwood at OpenPlant Biomaker Initiative. This guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to control our Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino using the XOD visual programming environment and leads to build your own devices for use in biological research. The complete guide is now available for download, along with a work-through XOD tutorial file. The Biomaker is a platform that makes use of a wide range of open, low-cost accessible tools to help biologists and engineers collaborate and build custom devices for biological research. Download the guide.
Beginners’ Guide of Raspberry Pi Pico Based on MicroPython. It is a four-chapter, 16-hour course that will help you get started with Raspberry Pi Pico and learn MicroPython from Scratch, step by step, to build some interesting projects beyond your imagination. No prior knowledge of MicroPython programming or electronics is required before starting the course. The course will take you step-by-step to learn this knowledge and quickly put it into practice on each project. Get the Beginners’ Guide of Raspberry Pi Pico here (available to download the PDF file).
TinyML with Wio Terminal Course. Wanted to get started with tinyML? Our team at TinkerGen has put together a thorough course (available for download in PDF format) that could just meet your need. The course features 5 projects that take you through the process of data collection, model training, and deploying on Wio Terminal using Edge Impulse and TensorFlow. Download the PDF course for FREE.
Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino Codecraft Course. The course will walk you through the basics of using Grove Beginner Kit with Codecraft, a graphical programming environment based on Scratch 3.0. The course is also available in Spanish, download one to enlighten the young creators! It’s specially developed for Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino, one of the best Arduino Beginner Kit for beginners. This all-in-one kit includes one Arduino compatible Board and 10 additional Grove sensors integrated into a one-piece PCB design. All the modules are connected to the Seeeduino through the PCB stamp holes so no Grove cables are needed to connect. Click to download the English course.
04 Customization Services
In this session, you could get a closer look at how we help the community to bring their ides to market with our prototyping, customizing, manufacturing and drop shipping services.
PCB Prototyping and Manufacturing
Why PCB Preheating is so Important? The importance of temperature profiling is widely understood in the mass production PCB assembly environment. The slow ramp and preheating phase help to activate flux, prevent thermal shock, and improves solder joint quality. However, when it comes to reworking, prototyping, or one-off DIY projects, it is easy to forget the significance of the preheating stage which can result in far inferior if not damaged device. So, for such an important step, why is it so often forgotten for the board on the bench? And what are the consequences of omitting this stage? Read more.
Everything You Need to Know about PCB Assembly Functional Testing. When designing a product, design is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is testing, to make sure you ship a quality, functional product to your customers. That starts with designing for testability and performing a functional test on every part of your product including the PCBA. Wanted to know about PCBA Functional Testing? Craig Rettew, one of our Fusion community members, has composed a detailed post that just covers everything you need to know about PCB Assembly Functional Testing! He covers the important elements (including Voltage & Power, Microcontrollers & Processors, Signals & Sensors, User Interfaces) that need to be tested, and how to do the test by showing a step-by-step tutorial. Read more.
Related Posts
Seeed Monthly Wrap-up VOL. 001 for May 2021
About Author
