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Samsung has unveiled three new systems-on-a-chip (SoC) at the Internet of Things World 2015 conference in San Francisco.
The Artik line consists of the Artik 1, Artik 5, and Artik 10. The Artik 1 is a dual-core chip with an area of 12 mm × 12 mm. Artik 5 is a more powerful dual-core chip with an area of 29 mm × 25 mm. The Artik 10 is an octo-core chip with an area of 39 mm × 29 mm. The Register reports:
Each of the three units comes with a different level of capabilities in order to meet the needs of a variety of applications. Final pricing wasn't discussed, but murmurings from the show floor suggest the modules will range from $10 on the low end to more than $100 for the top performer.
The tiniest of the three, the Artik 1, is just 12mm square, which Samsung says makes it the industry's smallest IoT module. Sammy is targeting wearable applications with this one and has pared down its specs accordingly. Inside, it packs an unspecified dual-core processor with one core running at 250MHz and the other clocked at 80MHz – so it's no speed demon but it knows how to sip power. Samsung says a smartwatch based on it could run for three weeks on a single charge. The unit includes 1MB of on-chip memory plus 4MB of flash storage, and it can output graphics at up to WVGA resolution (800-by-480). Rounding out the package are a Bluetooth Low Energy radio with an on-chip antenna and a nine-axis motion sensor with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.
If you want even more oomph for your devices, however, Samsung offers the Artik 10. This one comes in a package that's once again physically larger than the Artik 5, but it includes features that give it power comparable to a high-end smartphone. For CPU, it's got eight cores: four ARM A15s clocked at 1.3GHz apiece and four ARM A7s clocked at 1.0GHz each. For memory it has 2GB of LPDDR3+ RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage. Graphics are handled by an ARM Mali T628 MP6 GPU, which lets it push full 1080p HD video at 120fps. The Artik 10 has similar communications capabilities to the Artik 5, but more and better, including a USB 3.0 port in addition to the Artik 5's USB 2.0 port. It supports multi-channel hardware audio decoding, which makes this module well suited to multimedia applications.
Where OS is concerned, the Artik 1 is the oddball of the three Artik modules. It runs the Nucleus OS, a realtime operating system (RTOS) developed by Mentor Graphics that Samsung has used in its Touch phones in the past. The Artik 5 and Artik 10, meanwhile, are running Yocto 1.6, a customized embedded Linux distribution based on Fedora.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:30AM
Soylent is full of hackers and makers, so you can probably help me out with this: if one was to solder a chip this small to a printed board, what abilities and tools does one need?
I'm certainly not into the IoT thing, but I could find uses for such a thing. I want to take a local makers course in the future, but for now I'm gathering resources for that. Can anybody do some explanations, or point to some useful guides, like SoCs for dummies or something?
Thanks in advance ;)
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(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday May 14 2015, @09:22AM
Many small chips are surface mount or ball grid array and they're not very easy to solder by hand. While surface mount soldering by hand is definitely possible, it requires a steady hand, a soldering gun or iron with a very thin tip, good quality solder, and most likely a magnifying glass. SMDs tend to have a lot of pins and you'll have to solder them on one by one. BGAs are even trickier, but apparently it can be done by a hobbyist with an toaster oven [instructables.com], and it's pretty hard to check whether everything soldered on properly: that's typically done with an x-ray machine...
By the way, the ARTIK line are not SoCs. They appear to be full single-board computers, sort of like a Raspberry Pi but very small. Might be interesting to connect peripherals onto such a board.
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(Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday May 18 2015, @06:13AM
The real goal of this is for Samsung to get access to more data, as their SDK for these things helpfully passes all data to their servers.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday May 14 2015, @03:31PM
Do you have a specific project or goal in mind? Arduino [arduino.cc] is a good place to start if you've never done any soldering/electronics before. Something like Sparkfun's inventors kit [sparkfun.com] is good. If you breadboard some circuits that you'd like to make permanent you can try transferring your design to perfboard and solder it all together. Solarbotics makes a nice DIP Arduino kit [solarbotics.com] that you can leave permanently installed. If you stay in the DIP world and avoid SMD then you can survive (and have fun!) with few skills and only beginner equipment.
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(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:32PM
I like to shove a digital image sensor into an old film camera. The idea has been around for quite some time now, like more than 10 years. There has been a bunch of vaporware and failed experiments around this. I think that with the recent progess with minaturisation + batteries + computing power + 3d printing, it might finally become within reach.
I have only tiny experience with electronics, tho, but soon I'm finally finishing University, so I'll have some more time to learn it. I asked about surface mounted and ball grid, because I remembered that last time I checked, image sensors came in that format.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:18PM
You might be able to get the actual camera as a small module that you can interface with:
https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/102 [sparkfun.com]
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/s/camera.html?search_in_description=0 [seeedstudio.com]
https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=camera&b=1 [adafruit.com]
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