From February 25 to February 27, the ‘Embedded World Exhibition & Conference,’ the leading international fair for embedded systems, is coming to the Nuremberg Exhibition Centre, Germany.

SECO (Hall 1.330), an established company in the field of embedded electronics, has put everything in place for showcasing the latest additions to its product range to the tens of thousands of expected visitors.

In addition to its vast array of products and services in exposition, SECO is also going to present SENSE-D01  i.e., SECO’s newest microcontroller for industrial applications.

SENSE-D01 is SECO’s enfant terrible, a through-and-through silicon factotum in the embedded realm. To put it plainly, it is a cost-effective, wireless Industrial IoT microcontroller with battery support that is marked by impressive ease of use and a great degree of flexibility provided to the users.

SENSE-D01 is powered by Espressif’s ESP32 (ESP32-WROVER) module equipped with ultra-low power Dual-Core Tensilica LX6 240 MHz processor with up to 8MB pSRAM and up to 16MB SPI flash memory on-board. Integrated Wi-Fi/BLE connectivity and extra wired/wireless interfaces make the SENSE-D01 micro-computer a versatile addition to Industrial IoT solutions offered by EDGEHOG, i.e., SECO’s IoT-as-a-service platform.

To a certain extent, the SECO SENSE-D01 is to be considered a microcontroller on steroids, and it doesn’t come as a surprise when you look at the massive amount of resources, projects, and libraries made available by the ESP32 community. As a comparison, Arduino surged in popularity because of the simplicity of the system, enabled by the Arduino IDE, Arduino’s set of libraries that unlocked several functionalities of the device that were previously hidden behind hardware intricacies with just a few lines of code. The SECO SENSE-D01 takes this concept to the extreme with ESP32 SDK, a toolkit that lets the developer access pretty much the whole electronic unit. Most importantly, the SDK provides an environment crammed with resources, libraries, and functions ready for immediate use, and last but not least, it is Arduino-compatible, meaning that it turns the microcontroller itself into an Arduino-compatible microcontroller programmable via Arduino IDE.

And the flexibility doesn’t stop here. SECO SENSE-D01, although a lightweight, low-cost, low-power microcontroller, can sustain computational intensive tasks and executing neural network applications with ease.

Hardware-wise, it features Wi-Fi, BT, industrial I/Os and industrial-grade components, capable of working under the harshest climate and conditions. Still, the real marvel is its capability to do all of the above while battery-powered - you can put it on sleep mode or even deep sleep mode, and it will stay dormant for years and years, ready to activate in a moment. In terms of flexibility, the SENSE-D01 device is a comprehensive end-point controller for a wide range of sensors located throughout any installation. It fully supports I2S, CAN, PWM, SPI / SDIO, or I2C / UART interfaces to add a variety of sensors and industrial PLCs.

Software-wise, the SENSE-D01 compute module runs Micro EDGEHOG OS, i.e., SECO’s real-time operating system for IoT-powered microcontrollers based on FreeRTOS. With the help of the enormous community of ESP32 and Arduino users and developers, the SENSE-D01 can now adapt to existing software solutions, tools and programming environments, such as MicroPython, Arduino (C++), ESP-IDF (Espressif IoT Development Framework), Zephyr Project (scalable RTOS), Mongoose OS, and many others. On top of it all, SENSE-D01 is enabled by EDGEHOG, i.e., SECO’s IoT-as-a-service platform. It is available with a Device Manager and support for OTA updates across the entire fleet of SECO SENSE D-01.

Finally, SENSE-D01, although an over-the-counter product, is also customizable would the customer request it. It is both CE- and FCC-certified.

Speed, power, immediateness, versatility: with all these advantages, it is indisputable how the SECO SENSE-D01 is an invaluable piece for any embedded puzzle.