Arduino is going full steam ahead with its Arduino PRO family of boards for industrial applications. After the announcement of the Portenta H7 Lite board earlier this month, the company has now introduced the Arduino Nicla Sense ME designed in collaboration with Bosch Sensortec.
The Nicla Sense ME (Motion & Environment) board comes with a range of Bosch Sensortec sensors notably a 9DoF smart motion sensor and a 4DoF environmental sensor with AI capabilities, and targets industrial IoT applications either for research projects, rapid prototyping, or commercial products.
Arduino Nicla Sense ME specifications:
- MCU – Nordic Semi nRF52832 Cortex-M4 microcontroller @ 64 MHz with 512KB Flash, 64KB RAM, Bluetooth 4.2/5.0 LE connectivity (via U-blox ANNA B112 module)
- Storage – 2MB SPI flash for storage; 2MB QSPI dedicated for BHI260AP
- Sensors
- BHI260AP motion sensor system with integrated AI, “Fuser 2” 32-bit Synopsys DesignWare ARC EM4 core with RISC FPU
- BMM150 magnetometer
- BPM390 pressure sensor
- BME688 4-in-1 gas sensor with AI and integrated high-linearity, as well as high-accuracy pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors.
- USB – Micro USB port for power, debugging, and programming via SAMD11 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller
- Expansion
- ESLOV I2C connector
- 9-pin + 8-pin through holes and castellated pins with 1x I2C bus (shared with ESLOV connector), 1x serial port, 1x SPI, 2x ADC, up to 10x digital I/Os, up to 12x PWM,
- Programmable I/O voltage from 1.8-3.3V
- Misc – Button, RGB LED, RTC (on ANNA B112 module)
- Power Supply
- 5V via Micro USB port
- 3-pin connector for 3.7V LiPo battery, integrated battery charger
- Dimensions – 22.86×22.86 mm
- Weight – 2 grams
Arduino envisions plenty of applications for the board including predictive maintenance on industrial equipment, stabilization of robots and rovers, and exoskeletons all of which could benefit from the motion-sensing capabilities of the Nicla Sense ME. Other applications involve monitoring of perishable goods, dangerous gases (e.g. H2S, CO, Ethanol…), earthquakes, fall detection, and more. The Nicla Sense ME may also find its way into home automation products, virtual and augmented reality headsets, fitness trackers, etc…
The board is programmable with the Arduino IDE with the code running on the Nordic Semi Cortex-M4 microcontroller, but there are actually two other microcontrollers on the board, the SAMD11 Cortex-M0+ MCU acting as a USB to TTL bridge, and the “Fuser 2” core found in Bosch SensorTec BHI260AP AI sensor. You’ll find everything you need to get started on the documentation website.
The Nicla Sense ME is Arduino’s smallest board to date, and the first of the Nicla family, which means “victory of the people” in Greek, and designed to offer a “modular range of easy-to-use and cost-effective tools, created by Arduino Pro”, which means more Nicla boards should be in the works.
Arduino Nicla Sense ME is available now for €59/US$70 on the company’s store.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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The description sounded appealing until reaching this “AI” crap. A few years ago we used to say that motion sensors came with Kalman filters to reliably detect variations but keep accurate measurements. Nowadays we call any multiplication by a previous value “AI”. And if the coefficient can automatically dampen itself to avoid overflows, it’s called “machine learning” while it’s nothing more than what cameras have been doing for 4 decades to adapt to lighting condition. That casts a lot of doubts about the seriousness of the remaining parts of the device that do not even benefit from such marketing bullshit. But the device is expensive so it will probably be ordered by the same who are seduced by this “AI” thing because it allows them to put an “AI inside” stamp on their final product.
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