Wilderness Labs Announces Meadow Core-Compute Module for Building Secure, Production-IoT with .NET

Wilderness Labs, the creator of Meadow, has recently announced the availability of their Meadow F7 Core-Compute System on Module (SoM). The Core-Compute SoM expands the reach of their production-IoT platform to enable the 10MM+ .NET developer community to build and commercialize secure, embedded hardware in a fraction of the time and cost of existing platforms.

Based on Wilderness Labs’ flagship F7 Feather microcontroller development board, the F7 Core-Compute provides the same computing power, including an STMicroelectronics STM32F7 microcontroller and Espressif ESP32 coprocessor in an ultra-small, easily embeddable form factor. Measuring just 24.5mm x 34.5mm, the F7 Core-Compute SoM is about the size of a U.S. quarter dollar, and enables developers to build low-energy IoT solutions with Bluetooth Low-Energy and WiFi connectivity. Additionally, the Core-Compute adds an RMII interface, enabling ethernet connectivity for industrial use-cases.

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Along with the F7 and ESP32 microcontrollers, the Core-Compute includes a massive 64MB of non-volatile flash storage and 32MB of RAM, enabling even the most sophisticated of embedded use-cases. Along with the extremely low-energy requirements and a volume price point of $30, the F7 Core-Compute module is a truly low-SWaP-C (Size, Weight, (and) Power, and Cost) platform for embedded solutions.

Based on the ARM Cortex-M7 architecture, the STM32F7-based board unlocks capabilities similar to up-level computing form-factors and Single-Board-Computers like the Raspberry Pi, including the ability to drive advanced UIs on touch screen displays.

Coupled with Wilderness Labs’ advanced Meadow.OS, customers can leverage Mobile-OS like features out of the box such as: an integrated MySQL database engine, Over-the-Air (OtA) updates, advanced power management and sleep APIs, modern .NET hardware APIs as well as a modern .NET application runtime. The enables developers to use their existing development skills to write applications using popular .NET languages such as C#, F#, and VB.NET to build modern IoT applications. In addition, the massive, open-source, Meadow.Foundation library provides hundreds of peripheral drivers and industrial control libraries, making hardware development plug-and-play and eliminates the need for developers to spend time writing low-level drivers and hardware code.

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“Our customers tend to be building industrial and commercial IoT solutions, in many cases they’re modernizing industrial processes and integrating into SCADA architectures. Much of the existing infrastructure they’re working with is woefully insecure, so it’s gratifying to be able to provide them a rapid-development platform that allows them to use their existing skills to unlock hardware development, while also providing security by default,” remarked Bryan Costanich, Wilderness Labs’ co-founder and CEO. “And by offering the Core-Compute module, we’re able to significantly reduce our customers’ time to market, as well as ease a lot of their supply-chain challenges, given how hard it is to get a hold of these microcontrollers, since we’re on direct allocation from the manufacturer.” Referring to the new normal of lead times for microcontrollers of two years or more.

n addition, Wilderness Labs has created a Core-Compute developer kit which offers a low-friction way to develop and prototype with the Core-Compute module, by creating a host board that includes common functionality such as USB and IO headers, as well as advanced features like dual switching Ethernet, and SD Card for expanded storage. Both the Core-Compute module and the developer kit designs are fully open-source, allowing developers to take the reference designs and build them directly into their own products. “The Core-Compute module dev kit is meant as an accelerator, as it provides a known good reference design for the various advanced features of the module, so folks can basically copy and paste the schematic into their own designs. And if they have specific needs, they can also take the module reference design and build it right into their circuits too” noted Bryan.

The Core-Compute module, in combination with Wilderness Labs’ enterprise-ready ready Meadow.OS and their industry-leading, open-source, Meadow.Foundation peripheral and framework library, brings accelerated, scalable, and secure IoT development, and production to the .NET ecosystem.

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