A new platform for miniature IMU designs

Competition is really heating up for product designers. The new iNEMO system on board by ST is helping developers like Tussock Innovation provide clients with state of the art position sensing solutions with reduced development risks.

What does this mean for our clients?
Considering our past experience with ST and particularly the STM32F series we are able to design products to fit within the smallest enclosures ideal for personal IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) devices. This also allows designers like ourselves to add features like battery, Bluetooth, GPS, 3/4G and storage card technologies to create a plethora of new IMU opportunities. All this with reduced development cost, risk and time.
The iNEMO-M1 comes in a 13 x 13 mm package now that is small.

Learn more about the design process at Tussock Innovation.

INEMO-M1 is the first 9-axis motion sensing system-on-board (SoB) in the iNEMO module family. It integrates multiple MEMS sensors from ST and a powerful computational core: a 6-axis digital e-compass, a 3-axis digital gyroscope and an ARM®Cortex™-M3 32-bit MCU. This 9-DoF inertial system represents a fully integrated solution that can be used in a broad variety of applications such as robotics, personal navigation, gaming and wearable sensors for healthcare, sports and fitness. More 

Eagle CAD tutorials by Jeremy Blum

Jeremy Blum in association with Element14 has created a number of Eagle CAD tutorials. Although we don't use Eagle CAD software that much we have in the past and it is a great gateway into electronics development. I have linked these tutorials and hope that everyone can learn from them.

Eagle CAD Tutorial 1 Schematics by Jeremy Blum

Eagle CAD Tutorial 2 PCB layout by Jeremy Blum 

Eagle CAD Tutorial 3 CAM capture by Jeremy Blum

Small scale solar

Lately a friend approached me with a problem. He lives on a farm and due to the geographical nature of the landscape he is unable to supply internet to some of the other houses situated on the farm. There is no line of sight. Well there is but only if he uses a repeater. Intro Problem number two there is no power for the repeater on top of the hill.

We brainstormed, and so the design wish list now includes:

• Wifi repeater (To service the other houses)
• Hut (To support the repeater of course)
• Lighting (For ambiance in the hut encase he wants to sleep over)
• Stereo (More ambiance in the hut)
• RF radio repeater (To service dead spots in the farms handheld radio network)
• Something to power the system

The process so far.

• Hut moved into place (Tick)
• Wifi repeater quote (Tick)
• Solar options (Tick) here

More to come soon...

Tussock Innovation Community Pages

We have opened up part of our wiki to the public allowing anyone to browse the most recent discoveries we have made. The wiki contains information about the selection of hardware and parts, tools and tips for software, firmware and also aspects of design.

The community pages are here.

Syntro

The Private cloud technology by Pansenti

Recently we have been trialing Syntro as a proof of concept platform for some of our sensor based networks. I hope to be able to demonstrate some of the functionality of the system and maybe show some of the apps that we are working on in the future.

Thanks again to Pansenti for making such an awesome tool.

Tussock Innovation Technology Blog now hosted on Blogger

Hi all we have made some space on our server for development apps so have taken the plunge and moved the Tech Blog over to Blogger. There will be a few blog re-posts as we go through the motions and archive some of our old yet very interesting stuff. You will still be able to find information on our public wiki and we will link back there when required. Cheers Jesse

Video capture and encoding with the TI DM3730.

We are furthering our HD video capture experience by using the DM3730 video processor by Texas Instruments. Our OS is based on a Yocto project recipe from Scott at www.pansenti.com. Thanks Scott I hope to be able to repay the favour and publish some of the techniques we use in the future. The DM3730 offers the perfect combination of speed and flexibility and when coupled with a Linux OS we are able to use it as a file server, video encoder, small network router and more. Its so powerful we can run a full desktop OS on it while consuming less than 2.5W of power.