2018
PULP-Mr. Wolf dev-board
We designed the PULP-Mr.Wolf dev-board to have a fast development platform to i) validate and improve the PULP runtime/sdk and to ii) test and prototyping our applications. Examples of features addressed in the runtime continuous-integration life-cycle are static and dynamic power management, interfaces development and debugging.
On the application side, we target bio-medical signal processing like neural decoding for brain-machine interfaces development and deep learning-based autonomous navigation algorithms for insect-scale unmanned aerial vehicles.
Multisensor board
This PCB is a multisensor node with a PIR sensor and a microphone. It is able to communicate in a sensor network via Bluetooth 5.0. An on-board microntroller by Nordic Semiconductors can directly process the signals of the sensors. The current firmware implements an artificial neural network which directly runs on the ARM-Cortex M4F microcontroller. With the sensors, the device can monitor the occupancy of a room which is a crucial information towards more energy-efficient building infrastructure. The PCB is powered with a lithium battery and consumes extremely low power (87 uW in average).
Transient BLE Node
This Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensor node monitors ambient conditions like temperature, humidity, pressure and illuminance.
The measured sensor readings, as well as selected historical reading buffered in the FRAM memory are broadcast periodically as BLE beacons.
The sensor node operates fully autonomous by harvesting from ambient light. It is implemented as *transient sensor node*: it only accumulates the minimal energy in a tiny SMD buffer capacitor required for a single sense and broadcast operation of a few milliseconds, before shutting down again. The on-board energy management unit (EMU) enables efficient operation and run-time reconfiguration of the applications energy and voltage requirements. A separate backup power domain for an nano-power real-time clock (RTC) allows persistent time keeping across multiple hours of energy unavailability.
Despite its compact design, the sensor node offers all necessary connections for debugging, power measurement, and system state monitoring with ease.
Pulsed Current Source
This Intel Cyclone V SoC FPGA based controller is the brain of a Fixed Pulsed Direct Current Source developed in HVL which delivers arbitrary current up to 30kA to non-deterministic load such as arcs. Thru fiber optic, this controller interface with 1MS/s, 12bits measurement devices and IGBT gate drivers. An Ethernet connection allows programming the control parameters and gather the measurement data.