March Newsletter

Hello Subscriber, welcome to the March 2022 edition.

Arduino held a week of events from March 21 through 26. They streamed events online and also saw a host of offline community events around the world, with quite a number on the African continent. You should definitely check it out. Search for "Arduino Week 2022" on YouTube to catch up on all of the action.

 

If you have always associated Arduino with hobbyist projects then you can't be blamed for not knowing about Arduino Pro, their line of industrial products. One new product was announced during Arduino Week. It's called the Portenta X8. This board features two microprocessors and a whopping 9 cores! The NXP i.MX Mini MPU runs Linux while the STM32H7H4XI dual Cortex-M7 and -M4 MCU runs Arduino. This board supports containerization and Day 4 was dedicated to all things Arduino Pro. You can jump to 8:00 on the timeline for the introduction to Portenta X8. At the 42:00 mark you can learn about Project Cassini. At the 52:56 mark, Foundries.io does an introduction to container deployment on the X8.

 

Learning Content

The team at HarvardX has released course four in the TinyML series. This course is titled ML Ops for Scaling TinyML. ML Ops is to ML what DevOps is to software engineering.

Recent Events

  • Arm launched the Arm ENGAGE Lab in Eastern Cape, South Africa. The focus is to engage, educate, and cultivate the local technology ecosystem. If you live nearby, you should definitely check it out.
  • Nvidia held its developer conference on March 21 - 24 as well. As you might expect, there were a number of announcements as well. You can watch replays of the sessions on the GTC Portal. While Nvidia might be most famous for its GPUs, it also puts out a number of computer hardware such as workstations that are used for ML workloads. Let's not forget the Nvidia CUDA drivers as well, for moving ML workloads onto GPUs. If nothing else, I encourage you to watch the keynote.

What's New in Machine Learning

  • The topic of Ethics in AI is something that doesn't get old. Bias is something that needs to be addressed on a continuous basis. The team at Google PAIR recently released an explorable for measuring diversity. This covers the topic of diversity and inclusion in subset metrics.
  • A new blog post from Google tries to explain embeddings in a simpler manner.
  • Faster Objects, More Objects (FOMO) is what Edge Impulse is calling the new approach to object detection on edge devices.

What's New in Embedded Development

  • Check out the Arduino Portenta X8, the new system-on-module that combines an Mbed core with a Linux core.
  • The Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin is being called the most powerful AI edge computer by the manufacturers. It has lots of applications from manufacturing to life sciences and agriculture. You name it!
  • If you are into advanced robotics at the higher education level then the Braccio++ from Arduino might interest you. The arm is powered by an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect with a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microprocessor

What's New in Data

  • Do you ever have to deal with geographical data while analyzing big data? Do you utilize BigQuery for your analytics? It's now possible to load GeoJSON-NL files directly into BigQuery and you can read about it from the Google blog.
  • Have you got IoT devices that collect sensor data over time? I have recently set up some devices around the house that collect temperature, humidity and air quality readings every minute. How do you store your sensor data for further analysis? I am considering setting up a local version of InfluxDB to do just that. InfluxDB is a time series database. These types of databases work differently from relational databases. You should check it out if you haven't heard about it.

Join a Learning Challenge!

  • The K12 Learning Challenge is open to anyone who is involved in teaching computing to kids aged 6 through 16. In return for participating, you will get some units of the BBC Micro:bit. Join the waitlist to be notified when it goes live in April.
  • The Embedded Learning Challenge encourages you to improve your knowledge of embedded systems programming, IoT, or Machine Learning on microcontrollers by rewarding you with either a Sparkfun Electronics MCU or an Arduino MCU when you complete a course. There are other goodies as well, so sign up to get notified when it goes live in April.
  • If you would like to do more software competitions, please sign up for Google's Coding Competitions.
  • Note that the first shipment of boards have already been delivered, so no stories here!

Job Openings

  • The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a number of job openings.

I would like to invite you to join the IoT and Embedded Development Meetup group so you can get notifications of any upcoming webinars or physical event.

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Thanks for reading and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Until next time.

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