Episode 1: The Last Three Months

The last three months have been full of so much activity. After lots of planning and procurement, The Embedded Learning Challenge went live in Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria. We are giving out one Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect to each learner, and the goal is to train the next generation of embedded systems engineers on the African continent.

On the same note, Arm has a program for setting up hardware labs in universities. If you head a relevant department in a university or know someone who does, please reach out to me so I can make an introduction. Relevant departments are electronics engineering, computer engineering, and mechatronics engineering. The labs are free, the university only needs to provide space, power, and security for the hardware.

Recent Events

Edge Impulse recently held a 3-day conference called Imagine. It is packed full of information from various industry partners and all I can say is that even if you can only watch for 15 minutes at a time you should go ahead and do so. I have linked to the first day below.

Hackster recently organized a 2-day event called the Impact Summit. All I can say is that it wasn't to be missed, but if you did you can get a recap here.

The Google for Africa annual event is a celebration of what it's been doing on the continent. It is also an opportunity for us to get useful information about programs that we are not involved with, but that could be useful to others. The link below is to the Google for Africa Event 2022.

Google Cloud Next 2022 has come and gone, but you can catch all the action on YouTube. The link below is to a playlist so you can skip to the content that interests you.

Blues Wireless provides IoT connectivity solutions. Their event was meant to provide information about all of the new things they have released recently.

What's New in Embedded Machine Learning

Arduino announced a new partnership with Edge Impulse that gives them a white-labeled version of Edge Impulse Studio. Now, users of Arduino Pro devices (Portenta and Nicla) can train and deploy ML models directly from the Arduino IoT Cloud. You can get started by visiting?https://mltools.arduino.cc

What's New in Embedded Systems

• Sometimes all you want is I2C and a bit of digital and analog, I get that, and so does Pete Warden. Pete recently started a company that will be providing sensors with embedded ML in them so you don't have to do any ML. Their first product is a device that does facial recognition. It has one output pin that goes high when a face is detected, and you can use that to wake up a device to do additional processing. The additional data can be obtained via I2C. You can get more information from the?website.
• Arduino has released some LoRa gateways under its Pro brand. If you have been waiting to get your hands on a gateway due to device shortages then this is your opportunity. Learn more about these?here.
• You can now program the?Sony Spresense?from the Arduino IDE, and there is a new HDR camera for the Spresense. Here is a getting started video below.

Thanks for reading, please share if you enjoyed it, and see you in the next episode.