EEVblog #642 - TI Connected Launchpad

[rsjsouza]

erm, competition is pushing similarly configured arm M4's at $4 in single quantities, and just like you said it only goes down from there.

Bullshit. I can see that a LPC4072 for $8 in single quantities with a lot less memory (64kB flash), where the closer 512kB M4's LPC4078 for $11 as well as a MK64FX512 for $10 are much closer in price to the  XM4C129 at $17 - but this part has 1MB of Flash.

Despite the IoT marketing spin, your comparison between programmable microcontrollers with ASIC routers is really pointless. No, a "_elaborate end products_" does not compare to a fully programmable part - different markets with different purposes.

[German_EE]

After watching both videos I'm more likely to buy the 'Back to the Future' Lego kit, and I don't have any children.

[Isaac000]

I have a couple of these boards and like them. I think there are a couple of points worth noting:

1) The price is excellent in my opinion - TI sells it for $20 US and ships for free virtually anywhere in the world. Where else can you get any sort of micro-controller with a built in Ethernet port for $20 delivered?

How about Freescale's FRDM-K64F? It's slightly pricier at just over $30, but it also seems to come with a lot more. SD card connector, accelerometer, DAC, etc.
There are several free software tool options and generally is very easy to get started. As a bonus, Arduino form factor compatible so you can tag on a lot of other peripheral boards.

[JonnyBoats]

How about Freescale's FRDM-K64F? It's slightly pricier at just over $30, but it also seems to come with a lot more. SD card connector, accelerometer, DAC, etc.
There are several free software tool options and generally is very easy to get started. As a bonus, Arduino form factor compatible so you can tag on a lot of other peripheral boards.

I was not trying to suggest that the TI board was the only good deal or even the best deal out there. There are lots of good development boards.

With respect to the Freescale board, what you seem to be saying is that if one spends more one can get more, which is true of most things in life ;-)

[VK3DRB]

Is there any incentive to develop your own PCB to use this chip if you can get this complete package for such little difference?

Of course, if you need to have your own custom design/product.

It would be an embarrassment to put this tacky TI board in a professional piece of equipment. You won't impress the chicks with this PCB from TI.

[psbarrett]

Hey all. I work for Exosite, hope it's kosher for me to weigh in on this.

I'll try to answer some of the questions that have been raised so far about the Exosite side of things. (I don't know much about the firmware, it was developed by TI.) If any one has more I'll try to watch this thread, otherwise you can send an email to suppport@exosite.com (I read those along with a few other engineers).

First, from the video, the alert issue. You got it pretty much in the video, it's not a key-up/key-down value. It's actually a press counter, each time it you press the button it increments the value. That's why the alert would work for you the first time. It's actually not possible to do an alert every time the value changes with the Events interface, you'd need to use a script. One of my coworkers posted an example of how you'd do this in the blog post comments.

Then there was the stability issue you noticed. While it was probably to do with your Internet connection going down there are also some stability issues with the application, it's usually good for at least 24 hours, but that's about it. It is just a demo, it's not meant to be rock solid.

There was some questioning about latency. Most of the latency comes from the fact that these devices use polling for their reads so when you toggle an led on the dashboard the value gets updated on our system, but it won't actually turn the LED on or off until the device goes out an checks what the value is on out platform. Right now this is how all of our public APIs work, but we have some push methods in the pipeline (but no promises on when those will be done, if you've got something big where you need it let us know).

Mikey mentioned Arduino stuff. If you want to play with that, we've got a library with examples for most of the official Internet enabled versions: https://github.com/exosite-garage/arduino_exosite_library

For any other devices, all of our (non-custom) APIs are documented on http://docs.exosite.com and they all use standard protocols like HTTP or CoAP (basically a lightweight, binary HTTP over UDP).

Let me know if I missed anything.

[miguelvp]

Let me know if I missed anything.

How about the XMPP usage on the TI chronos,  wouldn't that use TCP over SSL? Is it available to the Launchpad as well?

[psbarrett]

How about the XMPP usage on the TI chronos,  wouldn't that use TCP over SSL? Is it available to the Launchpad as well?

I'm not all that familiar with the XMPP interface. (And know even less about that specific demo.) It definitely uses TCP and TLS/SSL is an option. It's "available" to the launch pad, but I don't know that you'd want to use it. XMPP is a somewhat heavy protocol. It's also a somewhat limited API, you're basically limited to reading the list of datasources and reading from and writing to datasources. You'd probably be much further ahead using one of the HTTP APIs. The data API (http://docs.exosite.com/data/) is just a simple POST or GET for writing and reading data. If you need to do more than that, you'd use the RPC API (http://docs.exosite.com/rpc/) which uses HTTP and JSON.

If you've already got something that does XMPP, or even just understand it really well, don't let me stop you from using it, but if you're starting from nothing the HTTP APIs are probably going to be easier to use.

[kaz911]

Hi Exosite

I have tried your IF - but I must say - I'm very underwhelmed to be honest. (Apart from your sales guys took less than 24 hours from connection time to try and up-sell)

Everything on the site is soo slooow. Last night - 2 hours downtime (and that was not on my end) - problems with CIK registration on my 2nd launchpad xl - graphs that get so full of data they take for EVER to show or highlight (typical when you let the client browser handle display via jquery and javascript). No post process data handling like "Aggregate every 24 hours to 1 min interval". So to me at least the ti.exosite.com seems far from finished - even for a Demo environment.

It does not really inspire confidence if the demo sites are not as stable as any kind of production site. People would use the demo site to get an idea of what would be possible with your system.

But thanks for letting us try.