HDK targets wearable market with RTOS, Bluetooth, GNSS support

MediaTek today announced the availability of the LinkIt™ 2523 Hardware Development Kit (HDK) for developers looking to create advanced wearable products. Based on the MediaTek MT2523G chipset, the HDK – produced by Silicon Application Corp (SAC) – offers dual-mode Bluetooth, comprehensive GNSS standards support and  industry leading performance in terms of time-to-first-fix, accuracy and power consumption. The HDK is ideal for developers looking to create more sophisticated wearables such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, health monitors, emergency locators and more.

This new HDK – the second for the LinkIt Development Platform for RTOS – takes advantage of the platform’s common tool chain and set of APIs. It offers developers the ability to create a range of IoT devices using a common software development kit, the MediaTek LinkIt SDK v4. With the HDK launch, the SDK has also been updated to include a new smaller, more efficient Bluetooth stack and various improvements to support the MT2523 chipset variants.

The goal of the LinkIt Development Platform for RTOS is to make it easy for developers to create code that powers a range of wearables and IoT devices. The new HDK puts MediaTek leading technology in the hands of professional developers to create exciting and compelling wearable products.

The LinkIt 2523 HDK is developed by SAC, one of MediaTek’s value-added resellers of chipsets and modules, using a hardware board reference design from MediaTek. The HDK provides an easy-to-use IoT development board for the design, prototyping, evaluation and implementation of commercial wearables projects.

The board offers developers a range of essential features to ensure devices are market ready. Key features of the board include:

• Robust connectivity with support for dual-mode Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy with integral antenna.
• Fast, low-power, high-precision positioning with integral HDK antenna for GPS and SMA connector for GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou.
• Integrated display and versatile peripheral options, including I2C, master and slave SPI, master and slave I2S, PCM, UART, 12-bit ADC and PWM which can be used for a broad range of wearables, including smartwatches, fitness trackers and wristbands incorporating various sensors.
• Low power consumption achieved by highly integrated SoC using 55nm ultra-low power (ULP) technology from TSMC with Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC), and multiple frequency and voltage modes.
• Flexible power options for external battery and USB (5V) charger.
• Additional onboard memory (eMMC) or the option to use a microSD card.

Key features of the LinkIt Development Platform for RTOS include:

• Based on the popular FreeRTOS with additional open-source modules (source code available).
• Supports chipsets based on the ARM Cortex-M4 architecture, offering high performance, low power connectivity.
• Supports multiple chipsets/hardware, including the MT7687F Wi-Fi SoC and the MT2523 Bluetooth/GNSS chipset family.
• Development and debugging in ARM Keil μVision, IAR Embedded Workbench and GCC.