​Samsung expands ARTIK IoT module line-up, upgrades cloud

Samsung Electronics has introduced two new modules in its ARTIK IoT platform and updated cloud capabilities.

The new ARTIK 0 family is low-power, lightweight and cost-optimized, while the higher-spec ARTIK 7 is intended for high-end gateways and multimedia applications.

ARTIK 0 is for end-devices such as HVAC, lighting, industrial sensors, and personal health monitoring. It has a power-efficient ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers and supports lower power wireless standards: ZigBee, Thread, or Bluetooth Smart. It comes with networking stacks, RF, and precertification for regulatory approval.

Powered by an octa-core 64-bit Cortex A-53 processor, ARTIK 7 allows users to run local analytics, allowing for offloading cloud computing locally. It has a built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, and GbE MAC interfaces. It comes with a high-end multimedia processor for video and audio and has Linux OS pre-installed to speed time to revenue.

The announcement was made to coincide with the Korea Electronics Show, which kicks off on Wednesday.

"We realized from day one that one-size, one set of feature cannot meet all the application needs in IoT," said James Stansberry, SVP and US head of ARTIK at Samsung, to ZDNet at the sidelines of the event. "The first generation [ARTIK 1, ARTIK 5 and ARTIK 10] was, let's give power to the people. This second generation is let's service better in terms of market needs and cost.

"We see camera and machine learning as the trend in the high-end market, especially in the US," he said. "ARTIK 7 has the capabilities of the 10 but doesn't have much memory and flash and slightly less graphic capabilities. It is designed for cost-conscious application from our customers."

The South Korean tech giant commercialized the ARTIK modules, starting with ARTIK 1, ARTIK 5, and ARTIK 10, in February this year after unveiling them in May 2015.

Samsung has called the ARTIK family an "end-to-end IoT solution" as it provides hardware, software, cloud, security, and partner ecosystems in the whole open platform.

Samsung launched the ARTIK Cloud in April this year, adding software services to its IoT platform. The cloud, an open data-exchange platform, has been updated with a management system that allows them to monitor and over-the-air update firmware more efficiently in their fleet of deployed devices, both edge nodes and gateways.

While most cloud become single-purpose for one device, ARTIK Cloud has the capability to create a rule for any device, and if you have multiple devices, it doesn't care about the structure of the data. This allows it to create cross-rules between the devices, combine their data, and perform different kinds of analytics on them, said Stansberry, thanks to cross-device rules engine.

"We see ARTIK Cloud as the centre, where all the devices are connected to it, and where we push out data to other clouds," he said.

Samsung also announced a new partnership with Naver, South Korea's largest search engine operator, in the latter's natural language processing voice assistant AMICA. AMICA will be running on ARTIK, allowing different kinds of devices with the module to provide voice services.

It also announced a partnership with component maker Arrow Electronics as well as Korean automation equipment firm MUJIN.

The new modules will be available from Digi-key, as it was for preceding modules, as well as Arrow and MUJIN.