Year in Review: Seeed in 2021
Happy New Year. The forth will be with you. Always!
Hello world, welcome to the last day of 2021!
It’s hard to believe, but another year has come to an end with all of us adapting to this big disruption and living in the “new normal”.
2021 has been an exciting year for Seeed and as it draws to a close, we would love to get a little introspective with the “The Year 2021 in Review – By the Month.”
Why do it by Month? Starting from May, every first week, we publish a Monthly Wrap-up featuring makers, projects, news, technical updates, and many more for the community. On this last day of 2021, I’d like to highlight some special moments in each month. They may not relate to greatness, but these are certainly special and meaningful.
⏰Long blog alter! Be patient and you will get a clear timeline of the community development and some special recall moments of the passing of 2021! 😜
❄️January
Jan 13: BeagleV
We partnered with BeagleBoard.org and Star to release the first ever RISC-V Linux SBC BeagleV.
Jan 26: The Things Conference 2021
Seeed exhibited at The Things Conference 2021 with a virtual booth where we presented our LoRaWAN devices. Shuyang Zhou, Sales Director at Seeed gave a speech on “The Shortest Pathway for Creating a LoRa Device”.
Jan 29: SenseCAP for Smart City
SenseCAP LoRaWAN Gateway and Sensors were deployed in the Vanke Design Community in Shenzhen. It aims to collect environmental data to build up a smart city system.
🧨 February
Feb 1st
Any other inputs?
🌱 March
Mar 10: We published a book!
Our first ever tutorial book “Coding by Gaming: Develop Games on Handheld Console GameGO Using Microsoft Arcade ” was published by Tsinghua University Press, one of the leading publishing houses in China. The book was written by LeiFeng, Curriculum Development Lead at Seeed, with the aim to lower the barrier for young creators to code.
Mar 16: Microsoft FarmBeats for Students Kit
We were honored to work with Microsoft and FFA to release the FarmBeats for Students Kit, which brings hardware, software, free curricula and activities to school and home for learning AI, ML, IoT & data science in digital agriculture.
Mar 27: Arduino Day & Raspberry Jam 2021
Virtual party time for the community. To celebrate Arduino Day and Raspberry Jam 2021, we broke two records by emerging two events into one and we did it online together with 1000+ participants from all over the country.
Mar 30: Awarded as Best Smart Agriculture Use Case
Seeed IIoT SenseCAP series were exhibited at Beijing International Wisdom Agricultural Equipment and Technology Exhibition and The IoTea – smart high-mountain tea plantation project, which is empowered by SenseCAP, has been selected as one of the Best Smart Agriculture Use Cases.
🚗 April
Apr 5: reTerminal is here!
We unveiled our first Raspberry Pi CM4-powered Human-Machine Interface device, reTerminal.
Apr 27: the IoT Plug and Play certified
Our reTerminal has been listed on the Azure Certified Device catalog with the IoT Plug and Play certification, offering a more convenient and efficient approach to developing IoT solutions.
🏭 May
May 5: Project of the Year
Benjamin Cabe’s Artificial Nose, which is powered by Wio Terminal, Grove sensors and Edge Impulse, was featured on the cover of Make:zine Vol 77 and many other media, and communities later on.
May 10: Crossover Collaboration with Blokdots
We’ve announcement the crossover collaboration with the one-stop simplified software platform Blokdots. With the partnership, Blokdots supports our Seeeduino Lotus and Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino® for people who want to create prototypes without coding.
May 17: Seeed TinyML's Journey Official Begins
To embrace the emerging Machine Learning, our first ever TinyML landing page was live with the whole collection of products, software, community project tutorials, online courses, technical updates and more.
May 20: Azure IoT Plug&Play Certified
Wio Terminal and 3 Grove sensors (Watchdog (VL53L0X ToF Sensor), Dust Sensor (HM3301) and LCD display) got the Azure IoT Plug&Play certified. All listed on the Azure Certified Device Catalog which can be easily used with the Wio Terminal and Azure IoT!
June
Jun 3: Meet reServer!
We released a new member of our reThings family: reServer, a powerful edge computing system closer to the real world.
Jun 17: Seeed Catalog Is Here
Our first ever Product & Service Catalog was published. With this comprehensive online catalog, we hope to help you to accurately explore, locate, and discover the whole galaxy of our products and services at a glance.
Jun 16: Partnership with ST
Seeed has been authorized by to join the ST Partner ecosystem, with our partner page live on ST’s official website.
Jun 30: SenseCAP M1
SenseCAP M1 Indoor Gateway released as our first product that supports for Helium Network, with many more followed later (SenseCAP LoRaWAN sensors and gateways).
🍦 July
Jul 1: Raspberry Pi Approved Design Partner
To leverage the partnership, we announced a new partnership with Raspberry Pi that Seeed became an official Raspberry Pi Approved Design Partner to support more industrial projects powered by Raspberry Pi.
Jul 10: CodeCraft for TinyML
By partnering with Edge Impulse, we re-launched our CodeCraft as the Graphical Programming Platform for TinyML. It means you can use drag-and-drop to code for embedded Machine Learning projects.
Jul 26: Workshop for XINSTITUTE
We organized a 2-day workshop based on our Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino for 33 students of XINSTITUTE. It’s always a pleasure to work with young people and helping them get started with open source hardware just amplified the pleasure.
Jul 30: “SDG Summer School 2021
“SDG Summer School 2021: Open Source Health Solutions” was held by Geneva Tsinghua Initiative (GTI) and supported by United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). We joined the program as a community partner that hosted 8 students at our maker space Chaihuo x.factory with workshop trainings and logistics support.
🥮 August
Aug 10: TinyML Foundation
We became an honorable Gold Sponsor for TinyML Foundation It’s all about ecosystem, and we are happy to contribute to fostering this emerging communities.
Aug 19: Discord Community
We finally have our Discord server, where we aim to offer a 24/7/365 platform for making, sharing and helping each other out.
Aug 23: AWS IoT Greengrass Certified
reTerminal got AWS IoT Greengrass certified and listed on the AWS Partners Devices Catalog.
🎃 September
Sep 4: Design Society
We worked with Design Society, the team manages the first design museum here in Shenzhen to carry out an onsite forum, a 2-day hands-on workshop for designers to tap into the world of open source hardware, and one online maker survey for local communities!
Sep 17: Mid Autumn Festival Party
To celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, we threw a special party at our office with lots of gaming, barbecue, alcohol, and snacks.
Sep 23: Partnership with Digi-Key and Machinechat
To accelerate precision farming to maintain an good environmental conditions for livestock, Seeed, Digi-Key and Machinechat collaborated to make a ready-to-be-deployed IIoT solution, that measures, transfers, aggregates, and visualizes the real-time environmental data of temperature, humidity, light intensity, and air quality.
💻 October
Oct 1-3: Edge Impulse Imagine
We participated in a panel, and conducted a “Graphical Programming for TinyML” workshop with Benjamin Cabe.
Oct 21: AI for Good by UN ITU
Founder and CEO, Eric Pan, had the honor to participate as a guest speaker at the webinar on “Open Source, Accelerating AI Innovation”, a series event of AI for Good organized by UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Oct 1-3: Openatom Foundation
Seeed joined the Openatom Foundation as a member together with Chaihuo x.factory to contribute to fostering an open source ecosystem in China.
Oct 21: Partnership with SnapEDA
We announced a new partnership with computer-aided design (CAD) model providers SnapEDA, to provide instant access to thousands of CAD modules directly from the Open Parts Libraries (OPL). With SnapEDA approved models, utilizing the Open Parts libraries in your design has never been easier.
🤖️ November
Nov 3: tinyML Asia 2021
We were invited to do a workshop at tinyML Asia 2021. Our Application Engineer Huiying LAI led a workshop for over 60 participants on Graphical Programming for TinyML, the Easiest Way to Start with Embedded ML.
Nov 17: Finalist for BETT Awards 2022
Graphical Programming Platform for TinyML “Codecraft” was nominated as a Finalist for BETT Awards 2022. It’s an international recognition and also a true honor for us.
Nov 20: Maker Faire Shenzhen 2021
Small twists and turns are the new normal when we still have COVID-19 around. We postponed our Maker Faire Shenzhen 2021 but to cheer up the community here in China, we did an online Lightening Project Sharing Session with over 3000 audience participated!
Nov 26: Seeed XIAO BLE Released
The greatly awaited XIAO BLE and XIAO BLE Sense were released. Both based on the Nordic nRF52840, they brought the first ever feature of being wireless to our Seeed XIAO family.
Nov 28: We Are on NHK Documentary
Seeed was featured in the NHK (the biggest Japanese public broadcaster) Documentary “The Experimental City: Shenzhen”
🎄 December
Dec 3: Partnership with Zenux
We partnered with Zenux to conduct a smart sentiment analysis solution based on our Nvidia Jetson compatible A206 carrier board, which targets for the retail industry.
Dec15: Partnership with Sensirion
We’re featured in Sensirion’s Partner Spotlight!! It has been a great journey that Sensirion and Seeed have been sharing together over the last few years to bring more sensing technologies to a wider community of developers in an open-sourced hardware way.
Dec 4-6: Exhibited at Beyond Expo
We exhibited at the first Beyond Expo Macao with our edge computing devices, IIoT solutions and SDG efforts. Eric was also invited to speak at 2 forums on open tech for sustainability.
Dec 18: IF 2022 Conference
We took the honor to join the IF 2022 Conference, organized by the GeekPark. Eric gave a 20-min keynote speech to share with over 1000 participants about the significant role that makers play in moving forward edge-cutting technology innovations.
We won two Helium Noble Awards:
🏆 Seeed SenseCAP Wireless Soil Moisture & Temperature Sensor won the 1st place in the Favorite Device Category
🥈 Seeed SenseCAP M1 Indoor Gateway won the 2nd place in the Favorite Hotspot Category
Dec 31: Seeed’s 2021 in Number
For the last entry, we’d love to share some meaningful numbers with you all:
259 Seeeders who worked hard from our offices in China, Japan, USA, and some even stay away from Sri Lanka to serve and support for our growing community
1170 makers participated in our offline 2-day workshop at x.factory and started their journey of creating things with open tech
70,000+ online orders of our official store and Fusion prototyping services
10,0000 SenseCAP M1 Indoor Gateways made their way to the globe connecting to the People’s Network starting from July, 2021
1000000+ community members including who are readying this long year in review shared this amazing 2021 with us
Well, there you have it – 2021 at Seeed in a nutshell! Thanks again for a wonderful year and we can’t wait to see what 2022 will bring us! We wish every single one of you a Happy New Year! And I want to share this famous quote from Star Wars: New Hope, as new year wishes as well: “The force will be with you. Always.”
Last but certainly not least, we’ll have a 3-day holiday to celebrate the brand new 2022, and we’ll resume operations on January 3rd (Tuesday). Until next year!
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