At Sensor Expo 2018 in San Jose, CA, an expert from NXP Semiconductors describes the Internet of Things (IoT) smart ball demo that NXP had in its booth.
Sensors in the ball provide real-time data and the system can publish the data to the cloud using IBM Bluemix Services. The data includes 3-axis measurements from an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a magnetometer as well as pressure and temperature sensors. The data allows sensing an event such as the free-fall and impact from dropping the ball.
The IoT Sensing Software Development Kit (ISSDK) used in the demo enables rapid prototyping and development of production applications using the company’s sensors and is part of NXP’s Sensor Toolbox ecosystem. The kit (offered as a middleware component in MCUXpresso SDK for supported microcontrollers) combines a set of sensor drivers and algorithms along with example applications. Running on a host PC, the ISSDK IoT adapter tunnels sensor data samples over Bluetooth from a board to the cloud over MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), an ISO standard publish-subscribe-based messaging protocol. The sensor data can be visualized on any Web-enabled device using an ISSDK WebClient.
The ISSDK couples with the company’s Freedom Sensor Toolbox, FRDM-FXS-MULT2-B, a sensor expansion board that enables sensor fusion using the MMA8652FC 3-axis accelerometer, FXLS8471Q 3-axis accelerometer, MAG3110 3-axis magnetometer, FXAS21002C 3-axis gyroscope, MPL3115A2 pressure sensor, FXOS8700CQ 3-axis accelerometer plus a 3 axis magnetometer and the MMA9553L sensing platform as well as BlueRadio® Bluetooth (BR-LE4.0-D2A) for communications.