188,00 industry professionals – the most ever – turned up at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to see and touch the latest, the greatest and sometimes the weirdest consumer products. From smart home devices to drones, to futuristic cars to the plant based “impossible burger”, there was a lot to see and experience.
Most of these products need innovative semiconductor devices or other technology to implement all of their cool new features. That’s where companies like QuickLogic enter the picture. For example, the QuickLogic suite had some interesting demonstrations that showcased how our solutions can be used in a wide range of advanced end products, including hearables, wearables, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We’ve listed a few of them below.
Predictive Maintenance AI Demo
“Predictive maintenance” is a goal of many operators of complex systems as it allows potential problems to be solved before they develop into real problems. A common element for electrical systems is some type of motor and we showed how QuickAI with the SensiML toolkit can be used to determine whether the motor is operating properly or not. We attached an EOS™ S3 device plus a low cost accelerometer to a small motor (a fan in this case) and captured data to determine when it was turned off, running properly, running but with something impinging the blade, or experiencing some kind of kinetic shock. The SensiML Analytical tool kit analyzed the data and built a model. The fan status information is then sent via a BLE connection to an Android phone. This scenario can be applied to many types of industrial operations. This approach also eliminates the need to have a human periodically check on the motor since the system very efficiently captures the current state and can report that information over any number of different possible communication channels.
Structural Health Monitoring
This demo includes a unit that can be attached to a wide range of large structures (building or bridge, for example) and measure the vibrations. In this case AI is used to detect whether the vibrations are from an earthquake or more normal day-to-day events. If it is an earthquake, the unit records vibration information and sends it to the cloud for analysis. For instance, a user might want to know whether the earthquake stressed the structure to the point of damage.
Smart Cognitive Streetlight
The demo from mtes Neural Networks street light featured an LED light along with an AI surveillance camera. The solar panel charges a battery that enables up to 90 hours of lighting, and the surveillance camera can detect if someone has fallen on the street, if there is some crime going on, if a car has stalled on the railroad tracks, etc.
Voice Reigned
CES19 keeps reminding us that voice is the new touch. Voice activated products were everywhere, including trash disposals, smartwatches, and fitness trackers. There were even voice-activated toilets.
The QuickLogic suite showcased its always-on, always-listening wake-word support for voice-controlled hearable, wearable, consumer electronics, and IoT applications.
SensiML Analytics Tool works for the Nordic Thingy:52
The SensiML Analytics Toolkit is platform agnostic. We demonstrated this at CES with tight integration to the Nordic Thingy:52 (and yes, that is actually what it is called) compact multi-sensor prototyping platform. This integration showed how the SensiML tool suite captures data from the multi-sensor platform, and then pre-processes it and displays the results from downloadable AI modules.
Investors, partners, and customers all attended our suite to see and interact with our demos and they all came away impressed with the advanced technology QuickLogic and SensiML showcased!
