On the Green Pad this week I received from Farnell a Developer Kit for the new Microsoft Sphere. This is one of the multiple different iteration of a compatible IoT device reference-design for Sphere, that still in “Preview” as public Beta release (but should go public very soon, September fall).
Still that the AVG implementation is really interesting under various aspects. In particular, this version is the Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit (product code AES-MS-MT3620-SK-G) and it’s a production-ready module based on the MediaTek MT3620 SoC, a Arm® Cortex™-A7 processor with the low overhead.
The design guarantees real-time thanks the two Arm Cortex-M4F microcontrollers; furthermore, the carrier board provides two MikroE Click expansion sockets and one Grove expansion connector (I2C), as sensors we can find 3-Axis accelerometer, 3-Axis gyroscope, temperature and pressure/barometric ones.
Currently, I don’t know exactly how to take fully advantage of this board in one of my projects, but it will be a good opportunity to try out Azure Sphere framework.
It is surely a wise move to give away few samples of these boards to make possible for developers to deepen on new technologies. It reminds me when I was working in Intel and we were giving away multiple devices (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc…) as reference design platforms and SDP (Software Development Platform) to developers to make them able to experiment with the newborn (at that time) Windows 8 ecosystem (such as WinRT runtime for Metro-apps) or with Android early x86-based implementations. Well Done Microsoft and AVNET!
