Premier Farnell, the Development Distributor, introduces the exclusive Avnet SmartEdge Industrial IoT Gateway; a new low-cost industrial gateway powered by Raspberry Pi. The Avnet SmartEdge Industrial Gateway will be showcased at Embedded World, Nuremberg, Germany from 26-28 February 2019 on stand 1-370.

The Avnet SmartEdge Industrial IoT Gateway enables seamless and secure connectivity to the cloud through Avnet’s IoT Connect platform running on Microsoft Azure, and is ideal for developing industrial automation applications such as, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, process control and automation.

The gateway addresses key requirements for customers across a wide range of industrial applications – including additional ports to handle industrial protocols and a trusted computing module for added security on the hardware.

Connectivity options include a full set of industrial peripherals which include CAN-BUS and RS-232/ 485 (Modbus and DeviceNet) interfaces, isolated digital I/O and dual 10/100 Ethernet, with wireless connectivity including WiFi at 2.4 GHz and BLE 4.2 via an integrated antenna with external connectivity, plus an mPCIe interface for cellular modems. Power is via a 12-24 V DC input, and an HDMI display output is also incorporated. It is based on an 8 Gbyte EMMC which replaces the standard SD memory card, with security guaranteed by an onboard TPM 2.0.

The device also has the 40-pin expansion header to link with a range of devices from the ecosystem of HATs and other accessories.

The enclosure features space for an additional internal accessory to provide Zigbee, Z-Wave, or LoRa communications capabilities, for example, or for multiple accessories through case expansion. Mounting options include DIN rail, wall or free-standing.

“The Avnet SmartEdge Industrial IoT Gateway offers a level of simplicity, capability and accessibility never before achieved in this environment”, says Ralf Buehler, Senior Vice-President, Product Marketing & eCommerce, at Premier Farnell. “This new and exclusive product represents the value that Premier Farnell can add to customers as part of Avnet’s unique ecosystem, creating opportunities to develop new solutions for customers, based on strong existing relationships with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.”

Lou Lutostanski, VP, Internet of Things, Avnet adds “Developers familiar with prototyping on a Raspberry Pi device will find it a straightforward task to bring their designs to a production environment without ever having to switch platforms.”

Premier Farnell will demonstrate the Avnet SmartEdge IoT Gateway at Embedded World on stand 1-370 where it is co-located with its sister company, Avnet Silica. The demo will show a predictive maintenance application that features a range of industrial sensors mounted on a motor, that sends sensor readings to the Industrial IoT Gateway using common industrial protocols.

The Avnet SmartEdge Industrial IoT Gateway will be available from the summer from Farnell element14 in Europe and Newark element14 in North America.

Premier Farnell is now shipping SmartEdge Agile, a low power, IoT ready-to-use device developed through a partnership between Avnet (Nasdaq: AVT), Octonion and ST Microelectronics. The first in a new category called “Meta-Sensing”, SmartEdge Agile includes nine sensors, and provides design engineers with the ability to implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge through an easy-to-use, zero-code interface.

Success in today’s IoT market requires a unique combination of hardware, software and security solutions — all working together. Adding AI to IoT solutions by traditional means often creates even more challenges, including increased costs and greater complexity, and longer time to market. Tools that can alleviate these challenges become invaluable.

By utilizing SmartEdge Agile with Octonion’s new Brainium portal and AI Studio powered by Microsoft Azure, users will have access to a “zero-coding” revolutionary machine learning tool that enables developers and manufacturers to easily bring intelligence to their devices. Brainium Portal can be used to easily initiate a proof of concept (POC) by leveraging more than 20 predefined AI algorithms that can be re-used through to product launch. A Brainium software agent is embedded into SmartEdge Agile allowing seamless interface with AI Studio and facilitating the end-to end IoT solution which enables customers to focus on their use cases.

Ralf Buehler, SVP Product, Marketing and eCommerce for Premier Farnell added: “As the Development Distributor, Premier Farnell is focused on helping customers at the early stage of design, bring greater capabilities to their designs through intelligent technology. SmartEdge Agile is a revolutionary product in its field, bringing artificial intelligence to the edge for IoT solutions. With easy to use, drag and drop programming, this intelligence is now available to deploy, even to users with no coding experience.”

"With SmartEdge Agile and Brainium Portal, we are building core software on top of hardware to create even more value for our customers," explained Lou Lutostanski, VP, Internet of Things, Avnet. “AI and security at the edge are continually requested by our customers when building their IoT projects. This dynamic solution and portal duo not only meets those needs, it also brings us closer to our customers, and is shaping the future of how IoT projects will be developed and executed.”

“Up until now, engineers have been creative in building IoT solutions with technologies such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but with AI Studio, they will now be able to add AI capabilities to their products,” said Cédric Mangaud, CEO, Octonion. “We have been working on our AI technology for four years, and I’m confident that this machine learning tool in conjunction with SmartEdge Agile, will help users to build AI models in a quick and easy way, making the process more efficient and value-driven than ever before.”

SmartEdge Agile is CE and FCC Certified with Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0. Its internal battery can be charged by the USB type C connection. The device is based on a 80-MHz, 32-bit Brainium STm32 chip with an ARM Cortex-M4. The sensors board suite includes two 3D accelerometers, a 3D gyroscope, a 3D magnetometer, a pressure sensor, a humidity and temperature sensor, a microphone, an ambient light sensor and proximity sensor, all from STMicroelectronics. SmartEdge Agile also embeds a Secure Element to insure authentication, encryption and integrity of the exchanged data. The device is built in a modular approach at different levels: the sensor board, the connectivity board and the USB Type C connector allows adapting the device to the exact customer requirement.

The Brainium portal provides developers, entrepreneurs and makers with:

• An easy and intuitive drag-and-drop widget-based interface (features include: device monitoring, device provisioning, device management) with a real-time insights on your SmartEdge Agile devices
• Export of the data coming from their devices
• AI Studio for motion and vibration analysis
• End to end security model from the SmartEdge Agile up to the Cloud

SmartEdge Agile is available from Newark element14 in North America, Farnell element14 in EMEA and element14 in Asia Pacific.

To Sign in to Brainium portal visit www.brainium.com/portal

Join Avnet at CES in Las Vegas, USA, January 8-11 in Tech East Westgate, Booth #2609, where SmartEdge Agile and Brainium AI solution demos and use cases will be on display.

All brands and trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks, and are the properties of their respective owners. Avnet disclaims any proprietary interest in marks other than its own.

Premier Farnell, the Development Distributor, has announced the availability of the Ultra96™, an ARM-based Ultra96 development board jointly created by Avnet, Xilinx, and 96Boards. The development board is based on the Linaro 96Boards Consumer Edition specification, features the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and provides developers with a unique and powerful environment to simplify machine learning. The 96Boards' specifications are open and define a standard board layout for development platforms.

The Ultra96 is uniquely designed to offer a wide range of potential peripherals and features programmable logic acceleration engines which help to deliver complexity with simplicity. It allows software developers to accelerate the development process for applications that require intense processing and high performance in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual reality, IoT and industrial control.

Cliff Ortmeyer, Global Head of Solutions Development for Premier Farnell said: “As the Development Distributor, our aim is to provide design engineers with the latest technologies that enable them to speed up their design process and get products to market faster. The Ultra96 board combines Arm processing with programmable logic in a convenient, low-cost and expandable board which showcases a wide range of potential peripherals and acceleration engines that will help design engineers counter software bottlenecks.”

The Ultra96 boots from the industrial rated Delkin 16GB MicroSD card (supplied with the Ultra96 board), preloaded with Embedded Linux. Design engineers can connect to the Ultra96 through a Web server using its integrated wireless access point capability, or use the pre-loaded Embedded Linux plus Enlightenment Desktop via integrated Mini DisplayPort video output. Multiple application examples and on-board development options are provided as examples.

The board includes four user-controllable LEDs. Design engineers can also interact with the board through the 96Boards-compatible low-speed and high-speed expansion connectors by adding peripheral accessories such as those included in Seeed Studio’s Grove Starter Kit for 96Boards.

Features include:

• Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZU3EG A484
• Micron 2 GB (512M x32) LPDDR4 RAM
• 16 GB microSD card pre-loaded with Embedded Linux OS
• 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 (provides both Classic & BLE)
• Mini DisplayPort (MiniDP or mDP)
• 1x USB 3.0 Type Micro-B upstream (Device) port
• 2x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0 Type A downstream (Host) ports
• 40-pin Low-speed expansion header
• 60-pin High-speed expansion header

The Ultra96 development board is available from Farnell element14 in EMEA, Newark element14 in North America and element14 in Asia Pacific.