Inspiring the Evolution of Embedded Design

August 11, 2020

Microcontroller Watch

Low-Power Dual-Core MCU

Serves Up BLE 5.2

Maxim Integrated Products has announced the MAX32666, an ultra-low-power dual Arm Cortex-M4 MCU with floating-point unit (FPU) and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 (BLE 5.2). Its battery life is extended by combining robust memory, security, communications, power management and processing functions traditionally performed by multiple MCUs into a single device, says Maxim.

Solution Aids Wi-Fi/MCU Combo Integration

NXP Semiconductors has announced that its Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combos and i.MX RT Crossover MCUs are now supported within its MCUXpresso software. By pre-integrating driver support within the MCUXpresso SDK, NXP is helping streamline Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo deployments.

Software for STM32 MCU

Condition Monitoring

STMicroelectronics (ST) has released a free STM32 software function pack that lets users quickly build, train and deploy intelligent edge devices for industrial condition monitoring using an MCU discovery kit. The software pack contains all the necessary drivers, middleware, documentation and sample code to capture sensor data, integrate and run Cartesiam’s NanoEdge libraries.

Robotic Arm Plays Beer Pong: Using PIC32s and IMUs

In this project article, three Cornell graduates accurately simulate the movement of a human arm on a small-sized robotic arm. The Microchip PIC32 MCU-based system enables the motion-controlled, 3-DoF robotic arm to take a user’s throwing motion as a reference to its own throw. In this way, they created a robotic arm that can throw a ping pong ball and thus play beer pong.

New Partner Solutions Roll for Renesas RA MCUs

Renesas Electronics has announced the second phase of new partner solutions supporting the Renesas RA Family of 32-bit Arm Cortex-M MCUs. The expanded RA partner ecosystem now features more than 50 partners and more than 30 out-of-the-box solutions. Renesas says these represent a wide range of enabling technologies, including options for security, voice user interface, graphics, machine learning and cloud.