Many new sensor-based Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are often provided by startups that are unfamiliar with the complex processes of abstracting, combining, and using sensor data. As sensors become increasingly critical to the success of IoT applications, embedded developers must find ways to easily and rapidly integrate MCUs with multiple sensor data communications to enhance application performance.

To address these issues, Freescale ISF and Processor Expert development technologies are integrated to provide an easy-to-use tool that abstracts various sensor data to streamline and simplify the process of integrating it into devices or applications based on the widely used Freescale Kinetis MCU family. This allows developers to focus on how to use sensor data instead of how to abstract and combine sensor data.

Babak Taheri, Vice President and General Manager of Freescale’s Sensor Solutions business unit, stated, “The growth of IoT is enabling services centered around products that were previously unconnected and whose operating environments were not recognized. At the heart of this transformation are intelligent sensor clusters capable of securely transmitting information wirelessly. Thanks to ISF combined with Processor Expert technology, developers can use sensor clusters to build embedded applications much more rapidly. Since developers are free from the burden of sensor data abstraction and collection, they can focus on adding features and IP, allowing them to drive IoT toward new innovations much faster than before.”

ISF 2.1, leveraging Freescale's Kinetis MCUs, connected solutions, IoT protocols, and security solutions, can significantly accelerate the time-to-market for sensor-based IoT applications. This framework is deployable across a wide range of Freescale Kinetis MCUs, provides immediate support for most Freescale intelligent sensors, and complements Freescale's extensive MCU support linkage system to offer developers a streamlined integrated design environment for integrating Freescale MCUs and sensors into customers' embedded system designs.

ISF 2.1 is designed to be developed alongside the Freescale sensor portfolio and now integrates Freescale's sensor fusion library into the easy and suitable Processor Expert sensor component. Additionally, this component allows for the complete configuration of base sensors and fusion algorithms. This framework can provide sensor data as a common engineering unit, allowing developers to switch between sensors without additional coding work to support various device-specific formats. Therefore, as demonstrated by Freescale’s embedded data logger for analytics, the ISF is a key element required to easily acquire data for use in Freescale’s sensor data analysis workflow.

Additional features:

- Register-level sensor interface

- User-defined serial data streaming

- Supports various Freescale accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and pressure sensors

- CodeWarrior and Kinetis Design Studio IDE support

- Comprehensive documentation: Software reference manual, API documentation, release notes

- Educational videos provided

- Example project for Freescale's Freedom development platform and sensor shield board

ISF is scheduled to be showcased at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Austin, Texas, next month. In addition to the scheduled demo at the event, a Freescale representative will provide detailed information on ISF and data logger technology in the “Sensor Data Collection and Processing for Sensor Data Analytics” track.

Supply situation and prices

ISF 2.1 is released as an open-source model, so developers can use the source code for free in the development process. ISF 2.1 can be downloaded from www.freescale.com/ISF.