Low-cost platform kickstarts IoT-sensor development

RS Components is making IoT sensing projects even simpler to start, and more affordable, with the newest UrsaLeo Pi development kit. By blending the Silicon Labs Thunderboard 2 sensor module with a Raspberry Pi development board, UrsaLeo Pi provides all the functionality of the UrsaLeo UltraLite dev kit at a lower price. Trading only reduced debug support and restrictions on hardware re-use, it is perfect for cost-conscious development in sectors such as Industry 4.0, healthcare, automotive diagnostics, and general data monitoring. The Thunderboard 2 module, as featured in the UltraLite kit, contains temperature, humidity, UV, barometric pressure, indoor air quality, ambient light, and gas sensors, a six-axis inertial sensor, a digital microphone, and a Hall sensor. The integrated Silicon Labs EFR32 Mighty Gecko multi-protocol 2.4GHz radio supports Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, ZigBee, or proprietary short-range protocols. Sample applications and APIs are supplied to run diagnostics, manage sensors, and share information with enterprise software or business intelligence applications. Like the Lite, UrsaLeo Pi is ready to connect to the UrsaLeo platform, which enables users to inspect sensor data and launch IoT applications such as storage and analytics from within their own customised dashboard. Adding new sensors is simplified, and further users can be invited, giving the flexibility to share data and co-develop projects while protecting the owner’s Google Cloud account information. UrsaLeo also offers a customisable dashboard and user-definable events to trigger alerts (texts, emails and actions). Up to 50MB of data per month can be sent to the cloud platform free of charge, by a single user.