Sitting in the office, Peter Lu, the R&D manager of HanYa Technology, lined up many brands of EVBs, from Arduino, which is the easiest for makers to get started with, MediaTek Filogic 130, an “MIT” IC EVB that has received a lot of attention recently, to the widely-used ESP32 and Ameba modules in the market. Peter commented on each EVB, and could name all the details from hardware specs, product features, development environment to operation mode.
At the end of November in 2021, MediaTek took advantage of the maturity of the high-speed, low-latency Wi-Fi 6 technology, and expected the application of IoT to become more vigorous, bringing considerable industrial opportunities. The company thus launched a one-chip wireless networking system that can create a Wi-Fi 6 ecosystem -- Filogic 130. Afterwards, MediaTek cooperated with the IoT Service Hub to promote domestic IC EVBs. HanYa Technology, one of the members of the “Domestic IC Expert Group”, assisted with technical support and carried out various functional tests and UX sharing of Filogic 130 to help product developers get started more quickly.
Expert Comments & Feedback
“We provide development and design services, from the provision of front-end sensors to the dashboard visual interface design that customers need in big data analysis, etc. All of these are our strengths.” Peter added that HanYa has been cooperating with large domestic production companies and legal entities for many years. The projects executed include setting up temperature and humidity sensing systems required for smart agriculture for farms in central and southern Taiwan, as well as assisting production companies to upgrade production line equipment, plan the networking of different equipment in the factory, collect production line data, and send it to the cloud or the company’s internal database. In addition, HanYa has also provided materials for big data analysis, and has helped optimize the visual interface presentation, etc. In short, they really have many years of experience in IoT.
HanYa Technology is versed at program design, software/firmware development, and system development services. They often write software and firmware programs in response to customer needs and design sensing devices to work with certain hardware. Thus, it is very familiar with the performance of MCU EVBs, which is the most critical among the sensing devices. A maker himself, Peter Lu is quite familiar with the domestic developer environment. The advantages and disadvantages of each EVB, their customer support, whether the ecosystem is complete, and the traffic of users’ attention are all the focus of his decades-long work. His R&D and practical experience is very valuable for product developers, since such first-hand experience can allow product developers to shorten development time and to get around the bottleneck which may have troubled them for a long time.
Establishing Domestic IC Ecosystem
After HanYa Technology joined the “Domestic IC Expert Group” of the IoT Service Hub in 2022, it first tested and promoted MediaTek’s Filogic 130 EVB, providing expert feedback regarding user experience. Peter picked up a MediaTek Filogic 130 EVB and explained, “In terms of computing speed, Filogic 130 is a little better than ESP32; if possible, the wake words for voice recognition can be further optimized.”
According to Peter Lu, the functions of domestic IC EVBs are very comprehensive, but the price competitiveness and the establishment of product ecosystems are not as good as the EVB of foreign brands. This is also a common dilemma when domestic startups are thinking of using domestic ICs. Since major domestic technology companies take orders of a large number and are engaged in mainly B2B business, they only produce a small number of EVBs since this type of B2C model is not their focus. When startup teams encounter a problem, they can only go to the agent instead of directly contacting the manufacturer, and they may even have no one to turn to for help. If the EVB is not optimized enough, and no one can help solve the potential problems, developers would of course choose foreign brands that are more popular and rich in developing resources.
Since many people are already using foreign-brand EVBs, many of them will post their experience or questions online, and manufacturers, fellow makers, or Internet gurus will answer these questions or even share their own experiences or suggestions. Such a question-and-answer interaction mode makes the product more optimized and forms a virtuous ecosystem. However, due to the small number of users of domestic EVBs, there is no such a virtuous ecosystem at present, and there are less applicable resources as well.
“Once an ecosystem is established, as time goes by, user traffic will increase naturally.” Peter believes that the “Domestic IC Expert Group” is actually assisting manufacturers to build a domestic IC ecosystem. This kind of investment takes time, and a team of experts can help examine the products so that manufacturers will not invest resources and achieve nothing out of it, or come up with a product that does not meet developers’ expectations. Take Filogic 130 for example. With the IoT Service Hub as an intermediary, Peter was able to report the test results back to MediaTek, and he also gave some advice regarding promotion and application strategies in the future from the perspective of practical implementation.
YouTube Tutorials to Help Developers Get Started
In order to allow domestic IC users to have more resources and accelerate the formation of an ecosystem, Peter has uploaded more than a dozen tutorial videos in which he tested or used the MediaTek Filogic 130 EVB. All of them can be found on HanYa Technology’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/LuPeter1971/videos). The rich content of the tutorials includes building a compilation environment, realizing Wi-Fi/Bluetooth function/connection, how to add programs to SDK projects on the EVB, realizing the application of smart speakers or voice assistants on Filogic 130, uploading data to the cloud via wireless networking function of the EVB, etc. In these videos, Peter teaches users how to reach the goal step by step, hoping to help them get started with developing in a shorter period of time.
“After all, many domestic development projects now specify the use of domestic ICs. If the team feels that it is not easy to use at first, the difficulty of development will increase, which will affect subsequent plans.” According to Peter Lu, Filogic 130 has integrated all the developing needs, e.g., network connection, Bluetooth, and digital signal processor (DSP) core engine, so its competitiveness is much higher than that of other EVBs on the market. “My current teaching goal is to help users get familiar with the system, and then connect the EVB to the Arduino IDE environment; I first started with students so that we can gradually establish familiarity with domestic ICs to cultivate future talents in the field of technology.” If we let domestic IC experts diagnose the products from an objective perspective, we can help eliminate blind spots in product development, and improve the competitiveness of domestic ICs in order to create the competitiveness of MIT products.
