Seeed Studio Aims to Help You "Make Sense From the True Wild" with Shiny New Products
Showcasing its vision with a smart and highly-integrated poultry farm, Seeed's 2023 product launch roadmap covers a broad gamut.
Seeed Studio has launched a raft of new products at an event dubbed "Make Sense From the True Wild" — and focused on, as the name implies, smart sensor networks, artificial intelligence at the edge, and a software suite called the Seeed Studio Solution Builder.
"In an era of uncertainty, accelerating digital transformation has been adopted as a promising approach to drive growth for industries," claims Seeed founder and chief executive Eric Pan of the background to the company's 2023 launch event. "We're excited to share our advanced perception system with the world. We believe it can provide the eyes and ears for digital transformation in real wild, enabling industries to see and hear the world with unprecedented clarity. By leveraging these powerful tools, businesses can gain insights, make smarter decisions, and unlock new opportunities."
That "perception system" is more than just a neat name for networked cameras, although they're part of it: Seeed is positioning a broad swathe of products, from individual SenseCAP devices through Internet of Things (IoT) gateways and industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to its NVIDIA Jetson-powered reComputer range, as being part of an overarching holistic vision of vertically-integrated systems working in tandem as one, both locally and in the cloud.
To prove the concept, the company showed off a smart poultry farm in which existing heating and ventilation systems had been tied in to a Seeed-powered smart agriculture system which combines SenseCAP temperature and air quality sensors with networked cameras, the SenseCAP gateway, a PLC controller, and a reComputer running edge AI workloads. Data gathered by the system was analyzed in real time, providing everything from a heatmap of where in the facility hotspots can be found to workflow automation and even livestock health monitoring through visual anomaly detection.
To support this vision of broad deployment, Seeed also unveiled the Solution Builder — or, as the company would have it, "one software to rule them all." Combining a data platform with a management suite, the Solution Builder offers local control and monitoring via the reTerminal Device Master, an all-in-one user interface with built-in color display, plus a remote monitoring and management infrastructure with an accessible application programming interface (API) alongside secure deployment and over-the-air update facilities.
For hardware launches, the company showed off the aforementioned reTerminal Device Master as an all-in-one ruggedized gadget based on a color 10.1" display and combining the functions of a human-machine interface with a SenseCAP gateway, programmable logic controller (PLC), and panel computer, powered by — and compatible with all software written for — the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) system on module.
Seeed also announced new reComputer edge AI devices, including the reComputer J3011 Orin Nano with 40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at $499, the reComputer Industrial Series with 21 TOPS Xavier NX, 40 TOPS Orin Nano, and 100 TOPS Orin NX options starting at $999, and Orin Nano and Orin NX variants of the reServer Jetson series for video workloads starting at $1,099.
In the SenseCAP family, Seeed unveiled the SenseCAP S2110 Sensor Builder platform, with Grove-compatible expansion and support for the XIAO RP2040 microcontroller board, the SenseCAP Tracker T1000 with GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth location tracking for $29 per unit, the SenseCAP S2100 LoRaWAN DTU with a claimed five-minute deployment process for over 100 plug-and-play industrial sensors and 400-plus Grove and SenseCAP devices, and the smart SenseCAP Indicator warning display terminal for industrial use.
The company also announced a 30 percent price drop for the SenseCAP One weather station, now tested to 80m/s wind speeds, which will relaunch in April at $1,299. Finally, the company's Edge Impulse-powered tinyML platform, previously launched with support for camera inputs, has been expanded to support microphone, vibration, and ion-sensor inputs — while the new Grove AI Gesture Sensor, a compact infrared motion detector, telegraphed plans to expand its tinyML vision to new areas.
More information on all the new launches is available in the Seeed Studio Product Catalog 2023, with hardware availability spread over the coming months through to the third quarter of the year.