Arm technologies: What do you use?

Ellie Warren

@EllieW
| She/Her

WILDLABS Associate Specialist based in Southern California

Groups

Hi Wildlabbers,

We'd like to learn a bit more about how all of you in this community are using tech built with Arm technology!

Let us know what project you're working on, what Arm tech is involved in your work, and where your project is headed in the future.

Thanks, excited to see everyone's answers!

-Ellie

Akiba

@Freaklabs

Freaklabs

I'm an engineer and product designer working on wildlife conservation technology.

11 February 2021 3:45am

Hi Ellie.

This isn't necessarily wildlife but Jacinta and I used the CC1310 wireless chip with the ARM Cortex M3 inside for a project with the International Rice Research Institute. It was to test precision irrigation on rice crops for dry planting and to remove the need for the traditional flood based planting systems. This allows rice to grow in arid regions that traditionally can't support rice as a staple crop. Water scarcity is also a worry for the institute due to global warming, hence focusing on growing rice in low-water environments. There's more information on it here.
For those interested, the CC1310 uses 900 MHz and supports the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It's one of the standard chips used in the SigFox protocol, although we mainly just used it for communications and not for SigFox implementation. We also implemented a gateway device that collected data from the networked rice paddies and sent water level data to the government server via GSM using SMS. We typically use HTTP but in the Philippines, cellular internet isn't as reliable as SMS, especially in rural areas. Both boards are based on the ARM Cortex M3.

I've attached pics of the wireless sensor boards and gateway we developed for this project as well.

Akiba

Barry Hurt

@Barry_Hurt

Red Cell Solutions

Software engineer and amateur photography

1 March 2021 12:33am

I've been tinkering with NVidia Jetson boards for about 2 years now. This is basically a small ARM computer, comes with an Ubuntu image but could run any linux I think. It's basically a mini computer with an Nvidia GPU, so you can do all sorts of things at 'the edge'.

I have been (on and off) building a bird feeder camera that would id birds and send just the text not images. Ultimately I would like to build a smart camera trap that would id animals and conserve bandwith by just uploading the data.

I started with the Jetson Nano, about 100 USD but when I started it was difficult to do things due to ARM.

Now I am working with a Jetson NX, about 500 USD and things are way easier. Visual Studio Code runs there natively, as do many python libraries and there are even a lot of containers ready made now.

Also, AWS has Graviton instances now - an EC2 ARM computer. One of my plans is to use AWS for building, testing, etc. and now ARM is an option there too.