My Four Trends for 2016
Here are four trends I see for 2016. Feel free to share your thoughts!
Makers Market Become Mainstream
Along with other segmentations of the hardware market —server, desktop, laptop, convertible, tablet, smartphone—, boards for hobbyists and makers add a new segment. Same occurs for software and netware.
The maker market shares the same standard typology as any other established market. Pure players, vertical integration (silicon manufacturers selling boards and hardware designers selling IDEs), compatibility and certification providers, to name a few. |
Big Players Come In
Bigs traditional IT players are desperate to protect themselves against two threads: substitutes and new entrants.
Hardware, software and netware substitutes provide a sub-set of the features at a fraction of the cost today, but those features are rich and good enough. More importantly, as those substitutes are refined and enriched on continuous process at a fast pace, they are soon becoming new entrants. Major players are embracing the maker market with specific offers. Silicon manufacturers sell their own-branded boards by-passing proxies. One especially active segment is the netware, with IoT offers designed for the maker boards. Competition (or rivalry) is exacerbated by the frugal innovation process and combination of new technologies which blur the lines between proof of concept, prototype and finished product. Let’s mention high level frameworks and hardware abstraction layers, CAD-CAE-CAM, additive manufacturing, 3D printing. |
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Dual-Core the Norm
Today, a MPU-based Linux-capable board costs the same as a MCU-based OS-less board.
This prompts the emergence of boards featuring two processing units: one Linux-based MPU for high level operation like display, WiFi, server, and one MCU —or more— for time deterministic processes like real-time GPIOs. There are two challenges: the MCU requires a direct access to GPIOs, and the appropriate software needs to provide on-the-fly uploading and running for programs on the MCU without rebooting |
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IDE as a Service
I still don’t understand why some boards manufacturers invest resources in developing their own IDE. Suffice to stick with the standards (GCC tool-chain, GDB and OpenOCD debuggers, and upload drivers) to leverage the already existing excellent IDEs. The no-invented-here syndrome?
With so much processing power provided by the MPU running on Linux, the boards can afford and deliver an IDE to be used from a browser, whatever the connection through USB, WiFi or Ethernet. When the IDE as a Service doesn’t run on the board, it runs on a virtual machine or a container on any computer, or in the cloud. This lowers development costs, eases maintenance and allows scalability for both the board manufacturer and the maker. |
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Posted: January 19, 2016