Moddable @ Sensors Converge 2023
Moddable recently took part in the Sensors Converge 2023 conference. Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, it lived up to its billing as "North America’s largest electronics event for design engineers." The show covered all aspects of IoT, from sensors (of course!) to energy management, embedded software development, security, cloud connectivity, and more. The Moddable team spent two days surprising show-goers with what's possible when Embedded JavaScript, IoT sensors, and advanced UI technology come together.
Experiencing Sensors
At the Moddable booth, we demonstrated the capabilities of several sensors using a display and a low-cost microcontroller. Our goal was to go beyond the data sheet to bring the sensor data to life with an interactive, visual experience.
One of our most popular demonstrations was of the popular Bosch BME680, a combined temperature, pressure, and humidity sensor. We paired the sensor with a beautiful round, full-color display driven by an ESP32-S3. The display delivers four completely different visualizations of the different sensor readings. Rather than looking like a boring lab display, these beautifully designed displays make the data interesting and let the user see changes in readings immediately.
Another popular demonstration used the Bosch BMI160 inertial measurement unit (IMU) to track motion an object's motion in real-time. The project was created by a member of the Moddable community, Thorsten von Eicken, who shared it just a week before the show. We were so impressed that we added it to our booth at the last minute. The sensor is connected to a Moddable Two (powered by an ESP32). The Moddable display renders a 3D box to show the orientation of the object. The performance is amazing, with almost no latency, showing off just how well the BMI160 senses changes in orientation as well as the powerful graphical capabilities of the Poco rendering engine in the Moddable SDK.
It is worth pointing out that Moddable had some of the best-looking demonstrations at the show even though every one of them was running on a low-cost, resource-constrained microcontroller. A handful of other vendors had some great looking demonstrations too, but they were all running on tablets or computers with at least twenty times more power. The ability to bring a visually rich user-experience to life on cost-effective IoT hardware is just one way the Moddable SDK brings unparalleled value to products.
Industry Standard Sensor Drivers
Everyone who's integrated a sensor in an IoT project knows that the sensor driver software can be a big challenge. On one hand, the data sheet provides every detail except a roadmap to getting the sensors basics working. On the other hand, there may be an abundance of software libraries available for the sensor, but they are incomplete, buggy, undocumented, or incompatible with the target hardware.
Moddable's Andy Carle took to the stage to explain a solution to this quandary with his titled "Grow Sensor Adoption with Standard JavaScript Drivers." By building on the portable embedded JavaScript APIs defined by the ECMA-419 standard, sensor drivers can be written so that they are portable to a variety of MCU hardware and thanks to the rigorous standardization process they are also well documented. As an added benefit, the sensor driver APIs are standard across vendors, making it easy to try out different sensors with minimal code changes.
These industry standard sensor drivers can be used on a variety of microcontrollers without any changes. They can also be used from both JavaScript and TypeScript languages using the Moddable SDK, and in low-code Node-RED MCU Edition environment.
Andy's slides are a great starting point to learn about the benefits of providing industry standard drivers in JavaScript for sensor hardware. They'll quickly get you up-to-speed on the technology fundamentals and there are plenty of links to additional materials to dig deeper. @@ Download the slides.
Conclusion
Sensors Converge 2023 was a great venue for Moddable to show industry experts the many benefits of using Embedded JavaScript to deliver IoT products, including a beautiful, modern user experience and the benefits of working with vendor-neutral industry standards.
If you are intrigued how to apply Moddable's technology to your IoT projects but missed us at Sensors Converge 2023, we'd like to talk to you. Visit our Contact page to learn how to get in touch and request an introductory conversation.