Aliensense's NXS Board Turns mikroBUS Clicks and Cameras Into Long-Distance Robot Sensor Nodes

Aliensense is promising to make robotic sensor setup easier, with its new NXS — a central hub that can connect multiple MIKROE mikroBUS Click sensor boards and a MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2) image sensor to a host over a single cable.

"NXS [is] a compact node that connects any MikroElektronika [MIKROE] Click sensor (mikroBUS) or a MIPI camera to your robot or autonomous system over a single long-distance cable," the Abu Dhabi-based company explains of its creation "It handles the hardware interface, the driver layer and the data transport, so your team works with sensor data instead of firmware."

Exactly how "long-distance" that cable can be depends on which mode the STMicroelectronics STM32G491-powered board is set to use. If you're after a video feed from the board's MIPI CSI-2 input, you'll need a host with GMSL2 or GMSL3 support or an adapter offering the same and a coaxial cable of no more than 15m (around 49') in length that carries power, video, and sensor data; if you don't need video you can switch to a CAN-FD connection for sensor data only and extend the range to 40m (around 130').

The board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, includes a fully-featured mikroBUS socket with I2C, SPI, UART, pulse-width modulation (PWM), analog, and interrupt support. The camera input, based on an Analog Devices MAX96793 GMSL2/3 serializer, accepts any MIPI CSI-2 compliant camera. A third operating mode, meanwhile, provides simple UART serial access in place of CAN-FD or GMSL2/3.

The NXS isn't quite ready for prime-time yet, though. The company is launching a "Vanguard" edition for early adopters, which comes with a $50 discount and the promise of a "direct channel to the engineering team" plus "priority on driver generation" — the latter meaning that anyone with a sensor not yet supported by the NXS can send Aliensense a unit and receive priority for driver development.

That may be worth its weight in gold: at launch, the company admits, the NXS will only have "validated drivers" for eight sensor families including the TDK IAM-20680 six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU), the TE MS5611 barometer/altimeter (Altitude 6 Click Board) and the NXP FXOS8700 six-degrees-of-freedom IMU with compass (6DOF IMU 3 Click Board).

More information is available on the Aliensense website, with pre-orders for the NXS Vanguard available at $199 ahead of shipping scheduled for August 20th; the board will retail at $249 once the Vanguard program has closed, the company says.