Laird Connectivity is now Ezurio
Its feature set is extensive, with security and stability at the forefront. An onboard dedicated cryptographic engine can run all crypto functions without impacting the performance of the rest of the device. It supports a Chain of Trust architecture that uses signed boot images, a secured bootloader, secure filesystem, user space, and more to protect your device integrity from threats. And with our onboard Summit Software Stack, the 60 Series SOM enjoys added Wi-Fi features and improved performance, with faster and more consistent roaming for harsh RF environments.
This blog post, however, focuses on another aspect of the 60 Series SOM: the many ways it can be implemented into your device. The SOM is a powerful inclusion as a wireless subsystem on your existing board but can also serve as the main board for your new design, or as a packageable IoT gateway for connection to a broader ecosystem of devices. The SOM is powerful enough to run your wireless design all by itself, and can be connected to other hardware, inputs, outputs, and more as a true platform for your product.
In this post we’ll be looking at the SOM as the core processor of your design with a hypothetical design example and how to design your wireless product around the SOM for a compact, fully-featured wireless product.
Example: An All-In-One Inventory Management Solution
For this example, we’re envisioning a handheld inventory scanning system built with the 60 Series SOM as its main board. In retail environments, maintaining an accurate inventory is done by keeping track of product at various staging levels: main warehouse stock, stock in transit, stock in local store inventory, and eventual removal of stock at the point of sale. Maintaining an accurate count at each stage is necessary for retail stores to have an accurate measure of what product is available and when to reorder.
Retail workers use handheld scanners when moving stock from the store warehouse to the sales floor, which helps keep track of how much product is still in reserve. This handheld scanner needs to serve several basic purposes: a scanner to retrieve bar codes, buttons to interact and confirm quantities, a display to read this information out, a battery that lasts long enough to do the job, and wireless connectivity to communicate up to the store’s inventory system.