News

Firm Offers Low-Code IoT Studio IDE

• By David Ramel
• November 14, 2018

Electronic components distributor Digi-Key Electronics has introduced new design tool called DK IoT Studio, a low-code integrated development environment (IDE) for Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

Featuring the drag-and-drop functionality typical in low-code tools, the Web-based DK IoT Studio IDE is said to simplify the creation of IoT solutions and help designers and developers go from ideas to prototypes in minutes without writing code.

Instead, said the company in a blog post this week, "You simply drag sensors, processors and other library elements and drop them onto the design panel. Making connections among these elements allows you to start collecting data and sending it to your mobile device or to the cloud." Along with generating Web and mobile app code, the IDE generates embedded firmware code.

Although it may seem strange for an electronics distributor to market an IoT IDE, the company said it already provides several online tools for diagramming, analog/power simulation and more, adding that it wanted to take what it learned from these tools and bring the benefits to the IoT space. For the IoT Studio offering, Digi-Key said it teamed up with Atmosphere IoT, a company that sells a low-code development platform to help IoT solution builders develop sensor-to-cloud projects.

This first edition of DK IoT Studio includes ESP32, a low-cost, low-power system-on-a-chip microcontroller with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from Espressif Systems, and Rapid IoT Kit, a power-optimized IoT end-node solution from NXP Semiconductors that includes several integrated sensors such as a gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, barometer, temperature, air quality and ambient light.

Benefits of the tool, Digi-Key said, include:

• Ability to create and import/export designs for shareable/customizable projects
• Utilization of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Integration of data into a third-party application, data warehouse or cloud platform

"The goal of providing a design tool like the DK IoT Studio is to offer a seamless path from the creation of an IoT solution to field deployment," said Robbie Paul, an exec at the Thief River Falls, Minn., company, in a statement yesterday (Nov. 13). "We are ready to help bring your IoT designs to realization faster and easier than ever before, as the tool is uniquely paired with access to Digi-Key's inventory of the world's largest selection of electronic components to help you take your designs to the next level."

For more information, interested developers can watch two videos that can be found here. The first one shows how to create a new project, program a device, provision a device and push data to a mobile app and the cloud. The second one demonstrates how to work with the IoT Agent and program code. The IoT Agent is described as a local application running in a computer's system tray, used to program hardware while acting as an intermediary between a computer's connectivity protocol drivers and the browser running DK IoT Studio.