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Upverter (Formerly Geppetto)

Upverter is a modular, web-based PCB Design tool to design and order boards built to your exact specifications for IoT hardware and devices. Experience the simplicity of building and customizing a circuit board in minutes. New to PCB Design? Try Upverter Education!

Upverter Drag & Drop Designer Upverter Quickstart Guide Upverter Education

Raspberry Pi CM4 Carrier Boards from Gumstix Create your next embedded application with a Raspberry Pi CM4 dev kit. Once you’ve finished development, you can deploy your application on a custom carrier board. Read Article

Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT in Manufacturing When it comes to electronics, consumer devices like smartphones and Alexa tend to get all the attention. However, according to Alun Morgan at Ventec International Group, “about 23% of PCBs produced worldwide are used in electronics equipment for manufacturing applications.” The numbers only go up when you include other non-consumer categories that support manufacturing operations, such as automotive, telecom, power generation/distribution, and Read Article

Lane Recognition and Tracking with NVIDIA Jetson Nano Autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming an important part of the automotive industry. Many believe fully autonomous vehicles will soon be driving alongside humans, and technology companies are in a race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles. In December 2018, Waymo, the company that emerged from Google’s self-driving car project, officially started its commercial self-driving car service in the suburbs of Phoenix. Companies like May Mobility, Drive Read Article

Production-Grade Battery Modules for Raspberry Pi Zero I’ll admit, I’m a big fan of Raspberry Pi. This set of inexpensive boards packs plenty of general purpose computing power into a small form factor, it easily connects to a LAN/WiFi and is accessible via SSH, and its memory is easily expandable with a micro SD card. It’s also easy to get a new prototype embedded application up and running directly from your laptop. The one aspect that prevents its application as a production-grade embedded system Read Article

Image Processing Embedded Systems with Modular Hardware Image processing embedded systems can be deployed quickly thanks to modular design tools With advances in industrial automation, automotive technology, remote sensing, and much more, image processing is taking center stage in many embedded systems. Image processing with older video systems was difficult or impossible due to the low quality of many imaging systems with perpetual uptime. As a result, older camera systems could be developed for Read Article

The Shrinking Manufacturing Cycle Traditionally, an engineering cycle has been considered to be on the order of 18 months. That’s the time between generations of products, whether it’s a new processor or a new Internet appliance. Today, a company that operates on an 18-month cycle is considered slow within many industries. If you have a lot of competitors, their release cycles are likely out of phase from yours. For example, if there are three companies serving an application Read Article

Leveraging the Ecosystem Being a great designer requires discipline. Most designers love to create, and design is an end in and of itself. This is fine when you design as a hobby. After all, the point isn’t getting the project done more than it is to enjoy oneself. When you design as a business, this all changes. Usually there’s some sort of clock ticking, like you only have so much money saved up before your business needs to start generating some income to pay for Read Article

Using Low-Volume Runs to Eliminate High-Volume Failures “High volume” is a relative term. It depends upon what your business does and how many of a product you plan to sell. For one OEM, a minimum initial run might be 250K units. For another, 10K is the expected run of a product across its entire market life. One way to consider “high volume” is that it’s large enough to hurt your business if you make a mistake. Put another way, high volume is high risk. And given the stakes, you want to minimize this Read Article

Real-Prototyping World There’s something to be said about the difference between designing your system on an evaluation board compared to designing it using the board on which your system is actually going to ship. One of the problems with using an evaluation board is that it’s a really nice environment to work in. Too nice, in some respects. The processor company wants you to have a positive experience with their chip so the eval board has all the bells and whistles Read Article

Riding Technology Waves There’s tremendous value in being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology on the market. Of course, the leading edge is sharp and there are ways you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. In general, though, having the flexibility to choose where you ride technology waves enables you to better balance the overall performance, cost, and power efficiency as you design systems. I remember an industrial embedded system I was optimizing Read Article

Accelerating Board Bring Up There’s that moment when you power up the first production board for a new design. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the prototypes operated. The question, “Is it going to work?”, still hangs in the air. At its best, this process is exciting. At its worst, you find yourself with an intermittent but persistent problem that means you need to spend more time and money. Today, there are a great variety of off-the-shelf boards available to jumpstart Read Article

Go From Maker to Pro We are in the Golden Age of development. Never before has it been possible for individuals to design complex electronic systems with as much ease, simplicity, AND functionality. Someone with a hobby in electronics used to stick to simple projects like turning on LEDs or making a radio hum to life. Now nearly anyone can build sensor-based hardware that can be controlled through a phone app and submit data to the cloud for remote analysis and Read Article

Linux and Android: What’s the Difference When purchasing an off-the-shelf module or designing a customized module of your own using a design tool like Upverter (previously known as Geppetto), you have to select an operating system. Often, you have a variety of choices. Two popular open source software (OSS) platforms are Linux and Android. If you’re new to design, how do you know which one you want to use? There are complicated, highly technical answers to this question. However, if you Read Article

Open Source Software - A Moving Target Open Source Software (OSS) is an attractive alternative to proprietary software platforms. There’s a lot to love about OSS. Lower cost is a primary decision driver for many companies. Others want to enjoy the freedom and flexibility to modify the software to their particular application requirements. Some companies don’t want to be at the mercy of the direction—or lack of direction—of proprietary software roadmaps. There’s also a lot to fret over Read Article

Optimizing Power Consumption Power efficiency—energy efficiency if you’re a purist—has become perhaps the highest-profile aspect of system design. This is especially true for IoT applications where a device may need to operate for years on harvested energy or a cell battery. Thus, a critical stage of design is power optimization. Typically, the first stage of power optimization is setting the power budget. For example, the system spec might state that the device has to be Read Article

Continuous Manufacturing Volume As a manufacturing term, it can mean different things, depending upon the industry. Volume production for an automotive OEM means hundreds of thousands of units. For an industrial CNC manufacturer, lifetime sales over decades might be in the tens of thousands. For many small design companies, producing even “low” volumes may be a manufacturing challenge. It takes success to be able to invest in infrastructure that supports higher volumes Read Article

A Comparison of NVIDIA’s Embedded AI Computing Platform Options Each new embedded AI computing platform blurs the lines between man and machine... When I first got started with machine learning applications, specifically text classification and sentiment analysis, I was working with an eCommerce client building everything onto a web server. Given the huge amount of data we continue working with on a daily basis, it only made sense to build our platform on a dedicated server. For some AI applications Read Article