A NEW COMMITMENT TO CONNECTED INDUSTRY AND SMART CITIES

COLABSOFT ACQUIRES IAR TO DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT LOW-POWER COMMUNICATIONS TRANSCEIVERS IN INDUSTRY AND SMART CITIES.

Being a visionary in 2016 is not difficult, as our cities and industries are transforming to make travelling, working, shopping and enjoying tourism easier through electronic means.

The use of mobile tools as extensions of people in their private and professional lives enables us to interact with many other systems, such as our cars, household appliances, security systems and much more. This will enable exponential growth in services to society and in industrial control and efficiency.

All this information is transmitted in many ways, among which we highlight those enabling us to communicate wirelessly:

• Bluetooth (currently in its low-energy version 4.2)
• Wi-Fi at 2.4 GHz
• ZigBee
• Sub-GHz radio frequency (916 MHz, 868 MHz, 433 MHz)
• NFC
• LOWPAN IP Mesh

Although the industrial sector has relied on ‘physical connectivity’ for decades, using cables and ‘secure’ communications protocols, the evolution of Connected Industry 4.0 is inevitably taking us towards a wireless, energy-self-sufficient world.

Texas Instruments has just published a document titled ‘Understanding Wireless Connectivity in the Industrial IoT’, highlighting the significant steps taken by Texas Instruments and the even more important investment in these systems by it and other global manufacturers (ST Microelectronics, Atmel, Nordic Semiconductors, etc.) to enable us to communicate wirelessly and SECURELY.

Thanks to systems equipped with wireless microcontrollers capable of reading sensors and remaining connected for years while providing information, society and industry are beginning to receive information from, perceive and interact with an increasingly secure cable-free environment. Industry must assimilate this change by training people and transforming its infrastructure.

Who will apply this technology?

We will all apply it and all benefit from it. Although there will be resistance to change in industry for reasons of security and reliability, the Ministry of Industry and Tourism (MINETUR) told us at the session we attended at Málaga's PTA that efforts would be made to adapt systems' SECURITY so this transformation can take place.

Society will also benefit from these technologies in everyday life, and very soon we will see multiprotocol mobile devices on the market that allow us to connect even more closely with our surroundings.

Tools for transformation

COLABSOFT is working on the design of embedded systems integrating wireless communications protocols, focusing particularly on two:

• Bluetooth 4
• Sub-GHz radio frequency (< 1 GHz, 916 MHz, 868 MHz, 433 MHz)

For both systems, COLABSOFT has just acquired IAR. IAR is a development tool specifically designed to programme 8051-family transceivers, currently the most widely deployed.

This enables us to design and develop these systems transparently for customers. We are already deploying our sub-GHz prototypes in industry.

We are part of the change.