ST, its Bluetooth, Ethernet, LTE Cat-M
Amazon FreeRTOS support with NB-IoT Starter Kit
will help embedded developers without cellular experience.

STMicroelectronics announced on the 14th that it has expanded support for Amazon FreeRTOS through its new STM32 starter kit at 'AWS re:Invent 2018,' which Amazon Web Services (AWS) held in Las Vegas, USA, last November.

Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system for microcontrollers needed to build low-power, small edge devices, and is easy to program, install, secure, connect, and manage.

Amazon FreeRTOS, based on the FreeRTOS kernel, is an open-source operating system for popular microcontrollers that has been extended through software libraries. This allows users to easily and securely connect small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services such as AWS IoT Core or more powerful edge devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.
The B-L475E-IOT01A Discovery Kit can directly support Amazon FreeRTOS and can implement various applications using the STM32L475 based on Wi-Fi, multiway sensing, and ultra-low power ARM Cortex-M4 cores.

This kit also supports LTE Cat-M/NB-IoT connectivity by utilizing an X-Nucleo expansion board that hosts an LTE modem and ST SIM card via the Arduino Uno V3 connector on the board.

For LTE Cat-M / NB-IoT networks, the cellular drive library, which was provided as ST's X-CUBE-CELLULAR extension package, is provided, and by utilizing it, embedded developers without cellular experience can easily and quickly create new applications. In addition, it was designed to abstract AT commands from various modems using an API similar to BSP.

This board includes a state machine that manages connections, exchanges data, and manages errors such as connection loss that have a significant impact on cellular networks. It also features a GSMA TS34/35 subset, which is essential for cellular certification.

This Discovery Kit has been upgraded to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2, including SPBTLE-1S, and implements IoT nodes that connect to the cloud using the AWS Smartphone and Tablet app, which acts as a gateway. Amazon FreeRTOS for BLE, for which a beta version was recently released, also supports ST preview features.
Wired connection is also possible through the NUCLEO-H743ZI, an STM32 Nucleo-144 board powered by a high-performance ARM Cortex-M7 core-based STM32H743 MCU that supports Ethernet and is expandable via an Arduino connector.

ST introduces and supports the new AWS IoT Device Tester to help users fully meet the AWS Device Qualification Program (AWS DQP). Common ST and AWS customers can save time by reducing test infrastructure and suite development with AWS IoT Device Tester, and gain confidence that Amazon FreeRTOS will work properly on STM32 microcontroller solutions.

Tony Keirouz, Vice President of IoT Strategy, Ecosystem and Partnerships at ST, said, “Amazon FreeRTOS is designed to provide a turnkey solution for developing cloud-connected devices using STM32 microcontrollers, based on pre-built security and connectivity libraries. ST’s goal is to enable all IoT designs to get started right away by leveraging all these new connectivity options and combining AWS’s vertical solutions from node to cloud with ST’s extensive IoT solutions and products covering sensors, processing, security, connectivity, and power.”