Premier Farnell announces an exclusive partnership with MATRIX Labs to manufacture and distribute MATRIX Creator to a global network of developers and makers of all skills levels. The MATRIX Creator is a Raspberry Pi add-on that provides multiple functionality and enables faster and more cost-effective development of IoT devices.
Features and applications
MATRIX Creator is ideally suited for the development of applications in automation control systems, particularly for home automation systems involving optical and sound elements as well as robotics, enterprise logistics, voice assistants, beamforming/DoA algorithms, retail intelligence. The microphone array, for example, allows a user to develop their own “do it yourself” Amazon Echo and Alexa based projects as well as voice recognition systems, with the eight microphones allowing devices to be activated from anywhere in a room. Similarly, the optical and physical sensors enable the development of facial recognition and motion detection devices for security applications.
Ideal aid for novices
MATRIX Creator is an ideal aid for teaching novices about hardware development and provides expert users with an extremely versatile piece of hardware to add to their suite of development tools. It accelerates and reduces the overall cost of the prototyping process for new products and devices, doing the up-front heavy lifting so developers don’t have to.
Development board
The development board, designed for Raspberry Pi, incorporates a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, an ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, a range of sensors for motion, temperature, humidity, light, ultraviolet and infrared, an 8-microphone array and a 35-LED array. The board, which can be programmed in 40 different languages, also incorporates integrated Z-Wave and zigbee communications plus connectivity via a wide range of analogue and digital input/output interfaces. It can also be used in stand-alone mode using its onboard processing capability.
