Courtesy : Nuvoton
The demand and concept of smart factories have been growing rapidly in recent years; industrial automation and industrial IoT have become popular practices. The various data information during the production process of production lines can bring rich values to enterprises as manufacturers can analyze the production line data to reduce maintenance costs, grasping keys to improving efficiency. Cloud application service vendors provide customers with data storage, analysis, computation, remote and real-time monitoring services.
In order to achieve the goals described above, industrial customers are provided with a quick and easy networking option: Nuvoton released IIOT smart factory quick networking solutions based on the NuMicro M48xxIDAE series. The NuMicro M48xxIDAE series adopted the Cortex-M4 core and provides up to 192MHz of computing speed; it supports sufficient memory resources with 512KB Flash and 160KB SRAM built-in and also has large amounts of analog and digital components integrated. It is suitable for smart gateway needs of different scenarios to help manufacturers collect the sensor data of the various production nodes, and upload the data to cloud servers for analysis.
The M48xxIDAE series provide rich peripheral interfaces; its external ports include 1 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port, 1 high-speed USB, 1 full-speed USB, 2 CAN buses, 6 UARTs, 3 ISO7816/UART, 2 USCI interfaces (can be flexibly set to UART/SPI/I2C), 3 I2Cs, 4 SPI/I2S, 1 QSPI, 1 I2S, 1 EBI, 24-channel PWM, 12-bit 5MSPS ADC with up to 16 channels, 2 12-bit 1MSPS DAC and two sets of analog comparators, able to connect various types of data collection devices on IoT terminals.
After the lightweight industrial control gateway based on the M48xxIDAE series collect the data from factory sensor terminals through UART, SPI, I2C and CAN, and other peripherals, the data is sent to the cloud through Ethernet (wired network) or wireless transmission. Finally, users can use computers or mobile APPs to perform real-time remote monitoring on the status of the factory.
In order to provide customers with more varieties of cloud connection options, the M48xxIDAE series supports multiple real-time operating systems, including Mbed OS, Amazon FreeRTOS, RT Thread, Ali OS Things, etc. It can also connect to the internet through HTTPS, MQTT, CoAP, and other different protocols, and its corresponding cloud terminals include Arm Pelion, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. Nuvoton further provides related networking sample codes, able to reduce the time needed for the customers’ engineering development.
In order to provide customers with convenience for engineering development, Nuvoton provided the NK-IOTM487 IoT development platform based on the M48xxIDAE series. This development platform supports 1 Ethernet port, and can also support wireless networking functions such as NB-IoT and LTE-4G through expansion modules. The M48xxIDAE series’ built-in hardware encryption and decryption engine can realize algorithms including AES, SHA, and ECC to encrypt and protect the data uploaded to the cloud, and further improve the performance of the overall system.
