Hello Subscriber, seasons greetings to you and your loved ones.

Congratulations on making it to the end of what appeared to be the longest year in recent history. It was a year that started with hopes of a vaccine for the coronavirus disease, and ended with new variants and scares of flight restrictions and booster shots.

But, we made it! Whether you could travel to be with loved ones or you had to spend it somewhere remote, I hope you could share some love whether physically or virtually.

I would like to start off by sharing an episode from Arm New Reality Series titled Expanding Television. It's about a South African company and I hope it inspires you to see what is possible. The embedded video is only 10 minutes long.

Learning Content

I would like to recommend two courses that will teach you how to train and deploy Machine Learning models on edge devices. The only requirement is that your microcontroller needs to utilize an Arm-based microprocessor such as Cortex-M. Once that condition is met, you can deploy using Arduino, C/C++, or any SDK that your board supports.

Articles

I put out three articles during the month, all focused on the Raspberry Pi Pico development platform. As a refresher, the Pico utilizes the Arm Cortex-M0+ microprocessor architecture for optimal power consumption.

Recent Events

A number of DevFest events were organized by various Google Developer Groups around the world. I spoke about the Google Cloud Platform at DevFest Inspire. I will link to it in the video below.

I also held a workshop at DevFest Lagos where I spoke about microcontrollers and TinyML, and also gave out some boards courtesy of Arm and Sparkfun Electronics. 

What's New in Machine Learning

• The TensorFlow team has released a collection of four videos on YouTube illustrating Machine Learning on the Raspberry Pi.
• A Google Developer Expert has been solving the 2021 Advent of Code challenges using TensorFlow. You will find this makes for some interesting reading.
• New datasets have been released under the MLCommons project to help researchers train better models.
• The MCUNet paper is over a year old but could prove useful as a starting point for transfer learning targeted at microcontrollers.
• A magic wand application requires that you hold a stick that is embedded with a microcontroller at the end. What if the microcontroller is on your wrist instead? That is what finger-input writing attempts to solve using Machine Learning.

What's New in Embedded Development

• A new soil sensor developed at Imperial College London could help reduce fertilizer waste by farmers.
• Enjoy this 28-minute panel session discussion on Moving ML Processing to the Edge on Smartwatch from the recently concluded Arm DevSummit.
• This article from back in April 2021 shows you how to connect an RP2040 board to The Things Network using a low-power long-range communication protocol called LoRaWAN. The Things Network provides a set of open tools and a global, open network to build your next IoT application at low cost, featuring maximum security and ready to scale.

What's Coming in 2022

The Arm Developer Learning Challenge! It's two parallel challenges over the course of nine months.

Learning is one way to improve your knowledge and to go beyond your comfort zone.

The objectives of the learning challenge include the following:

• Bringing learners on the African continent together to learn as a community
• Creating the next set of embedded systems programmers
• Attracting the attention of the rest of the world.

There are jobs out there, but we have two problems:

1. We are not aware of the opportunities
2. We are not prepared to take advantage of the opportunities.

The intention is for participants in this challenge to be better prepared for the opportunities out there.

The challenge will commence in Q2 2022, but anyone who would like to be a mentor can signify interest right away. This is an unpaid engagement but mentors stand to gain the following:

• Grow their network
• Gain exposure to the larger community of hardware manufacturers and IoT startups and companies
• Paid, lifetime, access to the specialization they are mentoring in
• Swag, free microcontrollers, and more
• Publicity

If this sounds like you, then please signify your interest in one of the specializations:

• Tiny Machine Learning Specialization
• Embedded Systems Essentials with Arm

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.

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