IoT Ready OSD335x: Tweeting Rubik’s Cube Solver!

The Trend

Industry analysts predict billions of things will connect to the Internet by 2020¹. Whether it is your fitness tracker or a smart fridge, we are now able track, analyze and make healthier choices to improve our lives. We are able to make our homes more secure and energy efficient. Soon we will watch Netflix in self-driving vehicles on our way to work. Due to the potential and the ability to personalize information, the industry has pursued connecting all devices to the Internet with passion.  Therefore, it is a given that your marketing department will come in asking you to update your product with IoT capabilities.

How Octavo Systems Helps Your IoT Design

Octavo Systems is leading the hardware effort to make IoT system development more accessible to everyone. Through System-in-Package (SiP) technology, it is possible to embed complex and powerful systems into tiny spaces while saving valuable time to market and cost.

The OSD335x System-in-Package family, featuring the Texas Instruments (TI) Sitara™ AM335x processor with a 1GHz ARM® Cortex®-A8 core, is the easiest way to build an IOT enabled embedded Linux system that is powerful and small. The AM335x SOC has the ideal feature set for IoT including connectivity, graphics processing, additional Programmable Real-Time Units (PRU) and plenty of I/O. By combining the AM335x with DDR3 memory, the power management system and over 100 supporting passives, the OSD335x SiP makes it easier to pull off an awesome IoT design. You will be able to focus on the “secret sauce” of your product as opposed to tedious hardware design. The OSD335x SiP runs Linux operating systems and can do complex tasks ranging from sensing or aggregating sensor data in industrial automation settings to acting as the brains of a gaming console or a drone.

Sherlock Tweets

An example of the integration that can be achieved with the OSD335x family is the Beaglebone® Blue. By combining the OSD3358 with wireless connectivity, lots of sensor I/O and motor control features, Blue makes a great platform for prototyping both industrial and hobbyist robotic solutions. To showcase Blue’s capabilities, the engineers at Octavo Systems built Sherlock Solver, the Rubik’s cube solving robot. He quickly became a celebrity in our booth at conferences. As is the case with all developing celebrities, Sherlock needed his own twitter account. So, we made use of the WiFi capabilities of the BeagleBone Blue to bring Sherlock to life! With some simple changes to the software, the system can communicate about the initial state of the cube, the time taken and the description of all the moves needed to solve it. Sherlock now tweets whenever he solves a cube; bragging the geeky statistics about the solve and letting his followers know how he’s doing. Now, do we have to worry about this Internet connected celebrity becoming sentient and taking over the world? Absolutely not! Well, may be?

How to Make a Robot Tweet?

Making Sherlock tweet was straightforward thanks to the Embedded Linux Community and the availability of software to get started. The python-twitter API makes it easy to tweet information and also collect twitter specific information. The PIL python library, which draws rectangles and writes text information on an image, was used to generate the image of the initial state of the Rubik’s cube. The availability of this kind of software support enables a few new lines of code to update your design to join the new generation of Internet enabled devices. With the OSD335x family and existing software resources, the only thing you need for success is to come up with the next big idea.

Octavo Systems is committed to enabling small, easy to build and powerful embedded IoT systems.  Contact us to know more.

Interested in building your own Sherlock Solver? We’ve updated a fun Hackster.io page.

¹ 2017 Roundup Of Internet Of Things Forecasts Forbes Dec 2017