The City of Dallas announces partnership with Ingenu to use the M2M network in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Plasma Computing is one the partners expected to deploy applications over the network. Details such as specific applications or timelines were scant.
We started the discussion with the free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Big Data for Smart Cities. The MOOC was created by IEEE and hosted on edX. The topics include:
- Applications of big data to sectors of a modern city, and how it can improve the life of its citizens
- Technologies, techniques, tools for developing Big Data applications
At the October, 2015 meeting, we discussed the FreeVolt, a device for harvesting ambient RF as a power source. Since then, they announced a first license in December, 2015 and have provided a whitepaper (PDF) on the technology.
The event continued with keynote speaker Greg Naizer of Lattice Semiconductor. Greg started with general trends and power consumption issues in the IoT space. He continued with some use cases in minimizing power consumption, where the focus was including a FPGA between the microcontroller unit (MCU) and a sensor or other device. The FPGA could be designed for some level of pre-processing in order to allow the typically higher power consumer MCU to remain in a sleep state for more cycles. For example, where a smartphone application calls for “always-on” voice commands, the intermediary FPGA may perform pre-processing for the initial word of a voice command sequence prior to waking the processor.
Audience question and answer concluded with mention of the Lattice programmable boards which might be used for testing in such situations.