IoTize

Description

The deployment of 32-bit ARM microcontrollers is increasingly present in the architectures of consumer machines but also industrial. The objective of the IoTize project is to bring connectivity to these devices even if they did not have it when they were designed. One of the interests in adding this connectivity is to be able to interface with devices such as cell phones to interface and / or control the information that passes through them securely. The targeted connectivity are NFC, Wifi, Bluetooth, LoRa...

The aim of the IoTize project is to propose a simple, turnkey solution to meet this need, and at the same time provide embedded systems with two important functionalities that are at the heart of smartphones: an ergonomic man-machine interface, and a gateway to the Internet (IoT).

The "IoTize" modules connect to the microcontroller debug port and provide :

NFC contactless technology as an interface between microcontrollers and smartphones;
Non-intrusive access to the microcontroller via the debug port. This connection mode allows an integration without modification of the embedded system hardware or software;
Secure data exchange from the microcontroller to the Internet server;
Software tools to quickly adapt the solution to any embedded system: smartphone and web applications, and configuration tools.

Objectifs

The objectives of the IoTize project were, on the one hand, to design a new type of connectivity for the NFC interface. This new connectivity is called active modulation. This new interface allows to have long communication ranges in spite of strong space constraints.

The simplified schematic of this architecture is shown in the figure below. The device integrates a real-time OS that can embed different applications and must have digital communities to interface with other devices: