STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, announced at AWS re:Invent 2018 extended support for Amazon FreeRTOS with new starter kits for the STM32, one of the industry’s most popular family of 32-bit Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers.
ST is leveraging AWS to boost designers’ efforts to create easily connectable Internet of Things (IoT) nodes with the combination of ST’s semiconductor building blocks and Amazon FreeRTOS, an operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage.
Based on the FreeRTOS kernel, Amazon FreeRTOS is a popular open-source operating system for microcontrollers that has been extended with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.
The B-L475E-IOT01A Discovery kit provides out-of-the box support for Amazon FreeRTOS and enables a variety of applications by using Wi-Fi, multiway sensing, and an Ultra-Low-Power ARM Cortex-M4 core-based STM32L475. Now, the same kit supports LTE Cat-M/NB-IoT connectivity using an X-Nucleo Expansion Board hosting an LTE Modem and ST SIM Card, coupled via the Arduino Uno V3 connector present on the board.
For LTE Cat-M / NB-IoT network, ST is providing a cellular driver library (initially published in ST’s expansion package X-CUBE-CELLULAR) that allows embedded developers who are not cellular experts to easily and rapidly create new applications. It is architected to abstract the AT commands from a variety of modems with a BSP-like API.
The same kit, upgraded to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2 with SPBTLE-1S, implements an IoT Node that connects to the cloud through the AWS Smartphone and Tablet app acting as Gateway and showcases ST preview support for Amazon FreeRTOS for BLE (announced recently in Beta).
For more information, visit www.st.com