This week’s Smart DevOps roundup features a starter kit to jumpstart developers building hardware for the Internet of Things, a mobile-ready developer kit to connect things to the Internet and a chip that simplifies app creation.

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ARM and IBM unveils IoT starter kit

Chip maker ARM Holdings plc and IT giant IBM unveiled an Internet of Things starter kit that is designed to help hardware developers easily test their prototypes. The Internet of Things Mbed Device Platform kit is designed to be set up and used in just five minutes after unboxing it.

The kit includes a preconfigured microcontroller development board that features one of ARM’s Cortex-M4 processors and built-in memory and a sensor expansion board that contains a thermometer, accelerometer, two potentiometers, small joystick, LED light that shows three different colors and a rectangular black-and-white LCD display. The two components fit seamlessly together and can be connected to the Internet using an ethernet cable or onto another device using a USB link.

The IoT starter kit price is pegged at somewhere between $50 and $200 and the boxed kit will be manufactured by Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.

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Spark Electron cellular dev kit

Most connected things today gain connectivity via Bluetooth or WiFi, which can be limiting if there’s no available Internet connection. Spark Electron aims to change all this.

Electron is a tiny development kit for creating cellular-connected electronics projects and products. It comes with a SIM card and an affordable data plan for low-bandwidth things. Spark’s SIM cards work in the U.S., Canada and Europe and support for other regions will be coming soon. This will allow devices to connect to the Internet without relying on a network hub.

Electron is currently on Kickstarter and has already raised more than $173,000, at the time of writing, with 33 more days to go.

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Simblee chip simplifies app creation process

RF Digital Corp. has designed a new chip called Simblee to allow developers to put mobile application behavior into the devices they create and pass the interface information over Bluetooth Low Energy to a generic framework Simblee app on the mobile device. This allows developers to produce apps for their devices without having to write a line of Swift, Xcode, or Android code to produce working applications for their inventions. The chip also allows the developers to bypass Apple and Google’s app store approval process for the apps they write.

The chip is quite small, the size of a standard SIM card, has an extremely low connection latency making it suitable for use in the IoT space, embedded in wearable devices, toys, and everything else you want to connect to the Internet.

“Simblee means Simple BLE,” said Armen Kazanchian, the founder of RF Digital. “And the two E’s at the end are for Everyone and Everything—as in it can be used by everyone for everything.”

photo credit: Dancing Lemur via photopin cc