Hello everybody my name is Nicholas
Powers with Arrow Electronics and the
holiday season is coming so what does
that mean? It's time to find a gift for
that engineer in your life something
that they can play with something they
can break something they can create the
next great robot with and something they
can learn with. So here I have 4
different items off of our Top 10 list
that i think are really some ideal ones
to get for that nerdy person in your
life
we have the Intel Joule development
board we have the Libelium LoRaWAN
developer kit, we have the Lattice
Semiconductor ICEblink40 kit and
then we have an inertial measurement
unit board from STMicro.  I'm gonna walk
you through each of these and kind of
why they might be interesting and why it
might be appealing to somebody that
really wants to learn in your life.
Here in front of me I have the Intel Joule
development board
you may know Intel has been trying to
get into the embedded microprocessor
space a little bit more they've had
their Edison boards and they've had
other things.
Well this is the next step up and you
may be familiar with playing with say
the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino, some
similar things,
this goes way beyond it.
Now what you have here is a development board but the
actual Intel Joule module is this
little silver module underneath the
heatsink that is all the computing power
right there. This little board is
capable of 4k inputs, so 4k video
encoding as well as 4k video decoding so
it can take in and out 4k video.
It also has a lot of functions built for
image recognition, for machine vision and
intelligent learning, so this is an
excellent board to learn with especially
if you want to dive into high-power
embedded electronics.
Here I have the Libelium LoRaWAN 868 long range
wireless kit. So what is LoRaWAN?
LoRaWAN is literally long-range wireless.
It functions on the 868 megahertz, 915
megahertz and 433 megahertz wireless
spectrums and provides kind of a low
data rate but also low power usage
wireless link for different sensors or
other Internet of Things devices you
might be wanting to put together.
LoRaWAN, just to give you an idea of
the range, they covered the entire city
of Amsterdam with 10 gateways so that's
pretty darn good and it actually has
really good penetration through walls so
it can work inside buildings recently. So
this here is a development board that
allows it to interface with anything
that's Arduino pin compatible so low
power microprocessors and lets you get
started really quickly.
This kit is great for somebody wanting
to learn how to make their devices
mobile and still keep that data
connection alive.
This is STMicros Nucleo IKS01A1 and
what is nice about this is it is meant
for all of your sensor needs and it
comes in Arduino pin compatible package
so you can work with low-power micro
processors but it comes with an
accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer
humidity and temperature sensors along
with a barometric pressure sensor, so you
can get all of your data off of this so
if you want to create say a self-flying
drone or self-leveling drone at least
you can start to understand how these
sensors would play out in the real world.
It allows your devices to really react
to the world around them and makes them
a much more independent system so they
always have to be controlled by somebody.
This board right here is definitely for
somebody that is looking to move beyond
just the simple Arduino projects and now
wants to understand sensors and how to
use that data in their system.
This one right here this is the Lattice
Semiconductor's iCEblink40 HX1K kit.
Now we're starting to see FPGAs in
every aspect of life around us in
electronics. They are present in some of the
most powerful drones, they're in machine
vision systems especially machine
learning and they excel at a lot of
things that just simple general-purpose
micro processors don't. This iCEblink kit
gives you 1024 logic gates, this is kind of
how you describe the fabric of FPGA to
play with and learn with and get up and
running quickly so it's not the most
powerful board in the world but it's a
great place to start when you're just
getting into how is the world going to
function with FPGAs in our modern-day
electronics. There you have it that's
our Engineering Gift Guide. These are 4 of
the gifts we think your ideal for the
engineer in your life, for somebody that
really wants to learn, somebody that
wants to play, somebody wants to go
beyond their
current knowledge. If you want to see
more like this subscribe to our YouTube
channel or visit Arrow.com where you can
find all of these boards and many more.
Thank You
