Dev Kit Wekly: STMicroelectronics STWIN Starter Kit
October 01, 2020
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This week you could win an STWIN starter kit from STMicroelectronics.
The STWIN, which is short for SensorTile wireless industrial node, is a dev kit that’s tailor-made for industrial engineers. It’s built around the STWIN core system board that supports an STM32 MCU, nine different sensors, and industrial connectivity options, all of which help take predictive maintenance to the next level.
It all starts with the STM32L4R9, an Arm Cortex-M4-based MCU that runs at 120 MHz and integrates both a DSP and floating point unit (FPU) alongside up to 2 megabytes of flash memory. The DSP and FPU are essential to the STWIN because, as mentioned, the board is a great place to start prototyping predictive analytics use cases that take signals from the analog world and transform them into digital signals that programs can act on.
On that front, the STWIN hosts sensors including a:
- 3D accelerometer and 3D gyro IMU with an integrated machine learning core
- 3-axis magnetometer
- 6 kHz, 3-axis digital vibration sensor
- Digital absolute pressure sensor
- Relative humidity and pressure sensor
- MEMS motion sensor
- Digital MEMS microphone
- And analog MEMS microphone
The array of sensors, all of which happen to be from ST, give industrial design engineers a ton of flexibility in condition monitoring application development, as it enables vibration analysis in the time and frequency domains or real-time monitoring over BLE connectivity. The STWIN is even packaged with the STM32Cube function pack, which includes the Predictive_Maintenance_BLE example application that addresses the use cases mentioned, as well as others that take advantage of all of these sensors. Once your application is up and running, you can log your data with the MicroSD card slot.
Further, there is Bluetooth Low Energy wireless support via an onboard module that allows users to stream data from various sensors and even control the STWIN using ST’s STBLESensor application for Android and iOS. In addition, an onboard RS485 transceiver supports all of those tried and true wired communications industrial engineers are so familiar with, as well as a USB OTG connection.
However, the STWIN is also Wi-Fi and cellular-ready, thanks to plugin expansion boards like the STEVAL-STWINWFV1 and small form factor daughter cards like the LTE Cell pack, both of which are sold separately. These can be mounted on the STMod+ connector, 40-pin expansion headers, or 12-pin female connectivity expansion plugs, which are accompanied by a 12-pin male expansion plug for additional sensor hardware.
Rounding out the hardware infrastructure, the kit can be powered by a 480 mAh Li-Po battery, and users can access the board via an STLINK-V3MINI debugger and programming cable, all of which are included.
Finally, we reach the software and tools. The STWIN is supported by STCube, but users can also access high-speed data log firmware, 3D CAD and GERBER files, and other optimized firmware files and software packages on the product webpage – st.com/evaluation-tools/steval-stwinkt1.html.
The device is also AWS qualified, which means that you can test remote condition monitoring applications by connecting the STWIN to the ST Predictive Maintenance Dashboard, an Amazon Web Services-hosted cloud application that lets you gather, monitor, and analyze vibration, ultrasound, and other environmental data.
If you want one of these kits for yourself, you can buy one directly from ST for $99. Or, as always, you can enter this week’s raffle and try to win an STWIN for completely free.
Good luck raffling and good luck condition monitoring to the lucky winner of this STWIN kit.
