Enter the Cloud with PIC and AVR IoT Boards
Today, if your product or application doesn’t have a connection to the cloud somehow, it is old hat. However, adding the cloud to your skills is not as easy as they like to make you believe, which is why all sorts of kits and tools to help you with this have seen the light of day.
Connecting to the Cloud Made Easy
Microchip, known by many of us as the manufacturer of the PIC and AVR microcontrollers, also jumped in and launched the AVR-IoT and PIC-IoT boards. These boards, and the supporting software tools, are intended to help you quickly connect to the cloud.
The demo software can be adapted to your own needs without much effort. Keep in mind, however, that connecting your own devices to your own cloud account remains rather involved, but that is due to the cloud service providers, the devices have nothing to do with that. Note also that nothing obliges you to use these modules for cloud-based applications. They are nice microcontroller modules with on-board programmer/debugger and Wi-Fi and battery charger that can find a use in all sorts of other applications.
In this video we give these boards a try to see if what they claim is true.
"There are two types of boards, one with an ATMega4808 8-bit AVR microcontroller with 48 KB flash memory and 6 KB of SRAM. The other has a PIC24FJ128GA705 16-Bit XLP microcontroller with 128 KB of flash memory and 16 KB of SRAM. Basically, this is the only important difference between the two boards. The PIC version has more horsepower than the AVR version. Both boards have an on-board debugger/programmer, a battery charger port, a light sensor, a temperature sensor, an ATWINC1510 Wi-Fi module. They also have a so-called secure element in the shape of an ATECC608A CryptoAuthentication device. The Wi-Fi module and the secure element take care of processing and resource intensive things like the communication stack and encryption, allowing a small 8-bit AVR controller to connect to the cloud and still let it do useful things at the same time.The boards also have a mikroBUS-compatible extension connector so you can connect other peripherals to them too."
