Ultrawideband, BLE, Wi-Fi and 802.15.4…. what do all 4 of these technologies have in common? Well, these are a few of the technologies that make up a sophisticated baby monitor!
Join us today to find out more about Future Electronics latest reference design, the Goldilocks demonstration platform.
On this episode of TechVentures, Lazina is joined by Don Gunn to explore the details and features of the Goldilocks Demonstration Platform.
Dive into the video to learn all about this new exciting project.
See the video or read the full transcript below.
Learn more about this board and see its featured products here: https://www.futureelectronics.com/future-development-boards/goldilocks
Sign up to request a sample of the Goldilocks Demonstration Platform
Hi! Welcome back to TechVentures.
My name is Lazina (L), and I’m a Technical Marketing Engineer at Future Electronics
If you are interested in checking out any previous TechVentures videos, click the link on the screen or check out the description box below:
https://www.youtube.com/future-electronics
Today I’m joined here by Don Gunn (D), our Advanced Engineer for Future Intelligent Solutions group.
We’re here to discuss a very exciting new reference design from our system design center, the Goldilocks platform!
L: Hi Don! Thank you for taking the time to give us an exclusive first look at the board.
D: Don’t mention it, it’s my pleasure!
L: Tell us a little bit about the board, what is the Goldilocks demonstration platform?
D: It’s a multi-sensor, & hub system designed in house by Future Electronics. It consists of a main hub board, which is also known as the mama bear, a wearable sensor node, also known as baby bear and an ultra-wideband add-on card, also known as the Honey Pot board.
L: What an innovative and unique idea! Seeing that the mama bear is the main hub board, is that where the processor is housed?
D: Yes, Mama Bear is a Linux System-On-Module powered by NXP’s i.MX8M Plus Application Processor, ublox’s MAYA-W276 Tri-Radio WiFi + Bluetooth 5.2 + 802.15.4 radio based on NXP’s IW612, NXP SE051 EdgeLock® secure element, high performance DDR4 RAM, and eMMC storage. The Mama Bear also provides audio input/output, USB, MIPI Camera / Display and HDMI.
L: What are some of the radios on the wearable sensor node that make the Baby Bear board possible?
D: Baby Bear sensor board is based on Murata’s Type 2DK module with built-in NXP’s UWB SR040 and BLE QN9090 chip set. On board NXP SE050 EdgeLock® secure element and sensors include Melexis’ IR temperature sensor, Bosch’s Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Sensirion’s humidity & temperature sensor and TVOC sensor. Using BLE and UWB, Baby Bear can communicate with Mama Bear to transmit sensors’ values and position information.
L: We’ve covered the mama bear, baby bear, and what’s inside the honey pot?
D: Honey Pot is the last piece of the integrated system. It includes Murata’s Type 2BP UWB module, using NXP’s SR150 chip set, to communicate with the Baby Bear, and three CUI’s MEMS Microphone for audio and video applications.
L: Wow, that’s really interesting. What kind of applications can we use this design for? I’m guessing there’s more to it than just bears.
D: Essentially the Mama Bear board is a Single Board Computer that runs Linux. This opens up the opportunity to do just about anything you can think of on a Linux based computer. For example, If you combine all three of the boards – Baby Bear, Mama Bear and Honey Pot, you can use this as a sophisticated baby monitor! By attaching the Baby Bear board to your child, you can get all of the necessary data you may want to know about on the display attached to Mama Bear. You can see temperature, moisture, air quality, distance etc. With all of this information you can know if the diaper is wet based on the moisture readings or soiled based on the air quality readings. You can also know if your baby has gotten too far away from you from the distance measurements coming from the UWB radios.
L: Amazing! These are all great ideas. The Goldilocks demonstration platform is versatile for many IoT application areas. Do you have any demos that you could show us today?
D: As a matter of fact, I do! We have developed a graphical display that runs on Mama Bear that will allow us to see the readings coming from all the sensors on the Baby Bear board.
In addition to seeing all of the sensor data we have some demos that illustrate the features and performance of the i.mx 8M Plus processor from NXP. We can do object detection, Pose detection and a number of other AI demos.
You can also do things like stream audio to a speaker over Bluetooth, set up a Matter border router for home automation applications and much more.
L: Don, this isn’t our typical reference design, I can tell there was some blood, sweat and tears that went into designing the project…. how can we help anyone that is interested in any of the application areas we mentioned earlier ?
D: The first step will be to contact your local Future sales team. Each branch location will be getting a Goldilocks platform so that the local AEs can run some of these demos. If the local AEs have any questions about getting the Goldilocks platform up and running, they can contact their regional FIS processor specialist or regional FCS sensor specialist to help out. We will also be providing access to all of the Linux kernel and QN9090 SDK source code so that people can customize the Linux image that is installed on the Mama Bear board or customize the code running on Baby Bear to do anything they like with the sensor data.
L: Thank you, Don!
This is only a brief overview of the many functionalities and capabilities of the Goldilocks Demonstration platform. If you’d like more information, please feel free to reach out to your local future electronics representative or visit us online at futureelectronics.com
Thanks for watching! And I’ll catch you next time on Techventures with Lazina.
