A Look Back of Two Year of Partnership between MediaTek and Seeed Studio

2 years have passed since MediaTek and Seeed Studio started working together to push innovation of wearable and IoT technology from manufacture to co-design products. As an exchange of advanced technology from the semi-conductor industry and robust open source developer community, we strive to create an open and innovative ecosystem together.

2014, First Co-designed Product – LinkIt ONE, Sensor Rich Platform for IoT Prototyping

In September 2014, we launched LinkIt ONE, an IoT development board from MediaTek co-designed with Seeed Studio. The embedded chip MT2502 is the world’s smallest commercial System-on-Chip (SOC) for Wearables. With its built-in support for GPRS/GSM and Bluetooth 2.1/4.0, this highly integrated SOC design avoids the need for multiple chips. Meaning smaller devices and reduced costs for device creators, as well as eliminating the need for compatibility tests. However, as an effort to make it maker-friendly, the development board has a similar size to Arduino. FIts pin-out compatibility and Grove 4-pin interface lower the barrier to embrace more makers.

Text Massage in a Bottle by ossum

 

2015, Seeed ‘s first Kickstarter Campaign Rephone with MT2502

After 8-year track record performance to help open source community, Seeed launched its first ever Kickstarter Campaign Rephone in late 2015. Rephone is the world’s first open source and modular phone kit— a combination of Xadow Duino with MT2506 chip and modules from Seeed’s stellar Xadow modules specialized in wearables technology. It was funded $276,865 by 3,399 backers. The partner Seeeed Studio is a startup and maker company itself. This proven success speaks for itself how products development could benefit from an open development platform.

Redesign of Rephone By Alexander Giordanelli, all-in-one controller case that you can insert in your smartwatch strip, game boy or connected to your MIDI.

2015, LinkIt Smart 7688 & Duo with OpenWrt

Followed by the success of 2 collaborations, LinkIt Smart 7688 comes out with more powerful platform to satisfy developers who wants to use OpenWrt. It is loaded with a range of packages to enable development of IoT device -whoes use-case comes close to a wireless router. The -MediaTek MT7688AN – chipset supporting 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity and offers the industry’s lowest power consumption for this kind of SOC. Moreover, LinkIt 7688 Smart Duo has an ATMega32u4 chip interfaced using UART to support Arduinio API, which lower down the development threshold.

Coming Up Next: From Making to Production for a Bigger Ecosystem of IoT

The chipsets, development boards, and software development tools form the components of each development platform, which makes it possible for anyone with an idea to turn it into reality. However, it is a difficult step for developers to take a proof of concept or prototype to production. MediaTek introduce Labs Partner Connect, a supply chain partner program that includes some of the world’s best software and cloud services, design and development, manufacturing and distribution partners. Seeed Studio is proud to be one of the partners. Starting from LinkIt Smart 7688 HDK, MediaTek and Seeed are working together to make IoT hardware as easy as compiling software and allow developers to focus on the product innovation.

 

Photo Credit: Alexander Giordanelli, MediaTek and Seeed Studio

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