Year in Review: Seeed in 2022
Discover the top inspirations of 2022, including the most read wikis, the most captivating products that we released, the most sparkling case studies, some exciting events, and the most inspiring community projects & their creators.
Well, it’s hard to believe but here we are at the end of another eventful year! 2022 was an exciting one for us at Seeed – we released lots of new devices and product, tried tons of new stuffs, forged on to tackle what lay ahead, and learned a little bit about a lot of important things. We’re endlessly grateful, as always, to have another 365 days of this amazing community’s support behind us.
Since we’ve been updating Monthly Newsletters for the whole year, I’m taking another way to do the introspective to 2022! For this year in review, you can definitely expect to get a glimpse of the wikis we all liked, the people & projects that inspired us, the products that captured the community’s attention, and some exciting events that we’ve been involved this year.
⏰ Long blog alert! Please be patient for a long read. 🙂
Product Spotlight in 2022
As the IoT Hardware Partner for digital transformation, product is where we invest the most of our resources. For the past 2022, we’ve added over 100 products of modules, and devices to our official store. To get a clear look at the roadmap of our products, here is a lineup of product spotlights that we want you to look back.
01 XIAO Series, Beloved by the Community
It’s impossible to pick out the most popular products in 2022. However, there is a very special series that stands out: the tiny but powerful XIAO series. This year, we’ve added 4 new members to the XIAO family, which are powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040, Nordic Semiconductor‘s nRF52840, and ESPRESSIF‘s ESP32-C3 (the first XIAO is powered by Microchip SAM21). A number to prove how popular these tiny boards are: in 2022, we’ve shipped out 172,000 XIAO boards to all over the world. More details here.
02 Products Co-Created with the Community
You might be a bit confused by the term co-created. The truth is we’ve been putting lots of efforts this year to help makers, developers, designers in the community to scale up their creations with us. So this is a series of products that designed and developed by the community, but manufactured by Seeed and sold on our official store. Simply put, it’s a system of licensed products or solutions, where we integrate the software power from the community (design, algothrm, tutorial, and more) with our hardware platforms as a full stack solution, and then bring it to the market together. Let’s take a look at some examples here.
In Jan, we launched the first device made in collaboration with Paul (disk_91) : Wio Terminal LoRaWAN Field Tester Kit, a truly plug-and-play LoRaWAN field tester for the Helium network.
03 SenseCAP K1100 Kit
We released the SenseCAP K1100 Kit in May, to offer a plug-and-play toolkit to unlock the potential of AIoT. The kit comes with all the essential sensors and devices, including a Wio Terminal, an AI Vision Sensor, and a LoRa®-enabled module – that together allows users of all backgrounds and levels to create DIY sensors for data collection and solving real-world challenges.
04 reThings Series
Among our reThings series products, reComputer and reServer are defined as powerful edge computing devices for the Edge. As they both supports for different systems (X86, Intel), we think it’s natural that we make them compatible with NVIDIA SoCs of Jetson Nano and Xavier NX. In Q1 we released reComputer of Jetson Nano and Xavier NX series. Later we also brough reServer J2032 to the family that comes with hybrid network support interfaces including 4G/5G and Long Range. Download the Edge AI catalog to have a comprehensive overview of featured NVIDIA Jetson full systems, software, applications, and selected use cases! As for the coming year, we’ll work with NVIDIA to bring Orin NX and Orin Nano to reComputer. Stay tuned!
05 SenseCAP LoRaWAN Series (Sensor Nodes + SenseCAP Cloud)
Among the first launch of Seeed’s IIoT product series, SenseCAP is focusing on wireless environmental sensing applications of smart agriculture, precision farming, and smart city. It consist of hardware products (sensors, data loggers, and gateways, etc), SenseCAP Cloud software services (SenseCAP Portal, SenseCAP Mate App and open dashboard), and API for device and data management. This year, we’ve released a series of SenseCAP LoRaWAN Sensor Nodes for for monitoring different environmental parameters. Also a LoRaWAN Vision AI Sensor made its special addition to the series that runs machine learning in support of a variety of AI models, such as image recognition, people counting, target detection, meter recognition and many others.
06 SenseCAP Mx Series
A decentralized network distributes information-processing workloads across multiple devices instead of relying on a single central server, which comes with the advantages of Increased flexibility, faster performance and enhanced privacy. The SenseCAP Mx Series are released to build and leverage the decentralization networks.
SenseCAP M1 & M2 for Helium Network
By partnering with Helium, we’ve released SenseCAP M1 & M2 hotspots with high-performance and rich features that help users to build the people’s network, a decentralized wireless LoRaWAN® infrastructure. By now, we’ve shipped out 450000+ Helium-native devices to over 100 countries, which contribute to building up the network ready for more IoT usages all around the world.
In early December, SenseCAP M4 Square – FluxNode was launched as a CUMULUS Node powered by FluxOS. With powerful hardware design, it supports potential extensions for other web 3.0 dAPPs. Featured with no code seamless set up, it enables you to deploy the FluxNode in scale and build a decentralized computational network.
07 Edge Series to Bridge IT/OT Divide in Industry 4.0
The Edge Series is the one we released in early November. It’s a lightweight industrial edge controller series, which is defined as an OT-IT Bridge in industrial automation scenarios. Powered by Raspberry Pi CM4 and Espressif Systems ESP32S3, they function as integrated PLC, PAC, Gateway, and HMI (EdgeLogix), and constitute the SCADA system together with reTerminal/Plus as the Panel PC. With Debian OS onboard, the Edge Series is supported by rich open-source software ecosystem, but we’re dedicated to gradually include more software to support the series: Node-RED, CODESYS, Iginition Edge by Inductive Automation, OpenPLC, etc. Read more here.
Top 12 Most Read Case Studies in 2022
Since a few years ago, we’ve built our industrial presence with the several ready-to-deploy devices lineup such as SenseCAP, reThings Series (reTerminal, reComputer, reServer), and Edge Series (EdgeBox and EdgeLogix) as we wanted to support global developers to employ AIoT solutions in industrial settings for various uses. The projects of the developers who use our industrial-grade and robust devices are as varied as an IoT system, including in vineyard, packing, retail, tea plantation, healthcare, husbandry, and even research. For this section, we’d like to introduce some of these inspiring applications bit by bit.
NLP simplifies industrial communications and improves manufacturing productivity
Meet PITAKURU, an Autonomous towing robot capable of towing loads in the warehouse, created by Seeed’s partner KEISUUGIKEN.
Have You Ever Seen A Pig Live Stream | IoT Application on Helium Network with SenseCAP S210X Series
TOP 10 Wiki + 1 AI Developers' Guide
As a platform to serve a community of developers, we value the documentation as much as we do for the product. Our AE team has created around 100 wikis corresponding with our new released products. Here are the top 10 most read wikis in 2022.
In this Wiki article we’ll use PC simulator example with SDL2 and modify it slightly to display UI full screen instead of in a window. Read more>>
Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 and Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense both support Bluetooth connectivity. This wiki will introduce the basics Bluetooth function and provide a demo with 24GHz Respiratory Sleep Detection Module, used by “Seeed nrf52 mbed-enabled Boards Library”.. Read more>>
TinyML is a subset of ML on the Edge or Embedded Machine Learning. To get you started with the cutting-edge tech, our EDU team has came up with a definitive step-by-step course on how to get started with TinyML using Wio Terminal. Read more>>
24GHz mmWave Sensor – Human Static Presence Module Lite is an antenna-integrated, health-friendly mmwave radar sensor that applies FMCW ranging technology, with operation in 24GHz, for implementation of human presence, independently of environmental influences. In this wiki, we’ll walk you through applications, hardware details, Arduino Libraries, and 7 demos (connect to ESPHome + Home Assistant included). Read more>>
In this wiki, we will show you how to utilize the accelerometer on Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense combined with Edge Impulse to enable motion recognition. Read more>>
YOLO is one of the most famous object detection algorithms available. It only needs few samples for training, while providing faster training times and high accuracy. We will demonstrate these features one-by-one in this wiki, while explaining the complete machine learning pipeline step-by-step where you collect data, label them, train them and finally detect objects using the trained data by running the trained model on an edge device such as the NVIDIA Jetson platform. . Read more>>
Grove Vision AI Module Sensor represents a thumb-sized AI camera, customized sensor which has been already installed ML algorithm for people detection, and other customized models. In this wiki, we will show you how to utilize the Grove Vision AI module Sensor connecting seeed studio XIAO Series and Arduino, to detect people, panda, and then display it on the website. Read more>>
Credit to Louis Moreau and Mihajlo Raljic, we provide this fundamental project that we are going to train an embedded Machine Learning model to detect hard hat and deploy it to the Jetson Nano. The Jetson NX and the Jetson AGX are both supported. Read more>>
This wiki will walkthrough step-by-step on how you can turn your ordinary house into a smart one just by using an ODYSSEY-X86! By the end of this wiki, you will be able to view a beautiful dashboard on your PC, tablet, smartphone, reTerminal and be able to control your home appliances and view other information such as sensor data right at your fingertips. Read more>>
SenseCAP – The Sensor Prototype Kit with LoRa® and AI enables you to rapidly digitize the world using LoRaWAN® and solve real-world challenges. In this informative wiki, you will be able to connect it to Microsoft Azure IoT, SenseCAP Cloud, Sensors, LoRaWAN networks (Helium, TTN), WiFi, TinyML and even some project tutorials. Read more>>
The Ultimate AI Developers’ Guide
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Edge Impulse is the leading development platform for machine learning on edge devices, free for developers and trusted by enterprises. Accelerate ML solution development using low-code to advanced integrations with the support from an expert. Learn more > Hard Hat Detection with Edge Impulse > |
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alwaysAI provides developers and enterprises a comprehensive platform for building, deploying and managing Computer Vision applications on IoT devices. Learn more > |
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YOLO is an algorithm that detects and recognizes various objects in an image in real-time. YOLOv5 is a family of compound-scaled object detection models trained on the COCO dataset, and includes simple functionality for Test Time Augmentation, model ensembling, hyperparameter evolution, and export to ONNX, CoreML and TFLite. Learn more > |
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Roboflow lets you annotate images super fast, right within your browser. Easily train and deploy a working computer vision model even if you are not a machine learning expert. Learn more > |
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Allxon is an essential edge device management solution that simplifies and optimizes business operations management by bonding together the AI/IoT ecosystem: hardware, software, and service providers. Allxon enables efficient and secure remote hardware management services for the NVIDIA Jetson platform. Learn more > |
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Deci builds an end-to-end platform that enables AI developers to build, optimize, and deploy ultra-fast deep learning models on any hardware. You can use pre-optimized models or self-contained models to efficiently train models from scratch, and automatically optimize hardware for inference performance. Learn more > |
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Cogniteam has been developing artificial intelligence for robots. They have combined this expertise to create the amazing Nimbus, a new cloud-based solution that allows you to manage your autonomous robots more efficiently. |
Community Project of Month in 2022
To celebrate the inspiring projects emerging from the community and to inspire more people to create and share their amazing projects, we’ve been running a series of monthly campaigns called Project of the Month since February, 2022. For each campaign, we selected our 4 favorite projects from our Hackster Project Hub as the candidate projects and invite the whole community to vote out the Project of the Month. By now, we have launched 10 successful campaigns with 41 projects and around 1000 community members involved and participated. Here we’d love to highlight these winning projects and express our shout-out to their talented creators.
New Things We Tried in 2022
Following years of uncertainty—and the global pandemic that has proven to be one of the most challenging events in history—we forged on with new tries and attempts. Join us on a retro-back journey through some of the year’s biggest new things we tried. Along the way, you’ll encounter some reasons why we tried, and get a glimpse of how we together with the community to collaborate to strive.
01 Open Source on GitHub
Open source is in our DNA, which plays a key part of who we are since 2008 (the year Seeed is founded). Nothing excites us more than building open sourced projects on GitHub. This year, we’ve lots of GitHub Repositories, but here are 2 that we’re too proud to not share in our year in review!
02 “IoT into the Wild” Product Launch
On March 25, we wrapped up our first-ever “IoT into the Wild” Product Launch. During the online launch, our Founder and CEO Eric had a long speech on Youtube to unveil a series of 12 AIoT solutions for outdoor applications, covering devices from low-power sensors to ultra-long-range gateways featuring Edge AI. It’s the first time and definitely not the last that we spoilered all the to-be-released products at Q1, and we wanted to take it as a platform to better communicate with the community about our product roapmap.
03 IoT2Wild Contest
As you might know, we launched the “IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Planet 2022” on Hackster from June through October this year to encourage the community to outcome solutions for 5 biggest real-world challenges we face. And as a result, we received 122 Project Submissions, awarded 104 free hardware kits, and inspired 561 Participants from 78 Countries in 6 continents. We announced 31 final winners for 6 types of Awards based on judging results from our 10 honorary judges at Hackster’s Impact Summit. Check out all the winning projects here.
04 Co-Create with Seeed Fusion
Co-Create with Seeed is THE campaign topic for our Fusion Team in 2022, with an ultimate goal to build up strong collaborations with the community where all members who want to create can realize their ideas, designs, projects and event solution with our Fusion one-stop services of PCB, PCBA customazation and manufacturing. To cop with this goal, here are some amazingly curated campaigns and user cases that I’d love to highlight.
Wio-E5 Parallel Dev Board for LoRa P2P Network Optimization by Aiman Akid
05 Overseas Warehouses in UK, EU, and US + Global Free Shipping
In order to better support our vast global community, we’ve opened 3 overseas warehouses in UK, EU (Germany), and US respectively. With these warehouses, we can support customers from 29 countries with a much faster shipping and no need for custom clearance.
We also enabled free shipping for customers who place orders from overseas warehouses in November — Free shipping on ALL orders of 3 items or more.
p.s. If you’re ordering from our CN Warehouse, you can also enjoy a global free shipping with 4XP shipping carrier starting from September, 2022.
Highlight Events & Webinars
Events allow for a more intimate and engaging experience with our community. In 2022, we’ve organized, and participated in quite amount of webinars, workshops, forums and even hackathons. Here are some of the most exciting ones & their play-backs.
Seeed at Impact Summit: Build an AI-Powered Weather Station with WiFi/LoRa
Webinar: Connect your ROS Project to the Cloud with Nimbus by Dr.Eli Khalastchi
Seeed at The Things Conference: LoRaWAN + AI: A Quicker and Smarter Way to Achieve Digital Transformation
Docker Community All-Hands: The Rise of No-Code AI Vision at the Edge
YOLO VISION: Bridging AI From Digital to Physical: Real-World AI, Right at the Edge
OpenCV Weekly: 5 to 100+FPS, Boosting Inference at the Edge
Node-RED Con 2022: No-Code AI Vision at the edge with Node-RED
That’s all we have for this year in review! We have nothing but high hopes for the coming year and are, as always, so grateful to greet a new year as part of such a strong community – thank you for another wonderful year of support! We wish you all a 2023 filled with fun, inspiration, and creations.
Last but certainly not least, we’d love to end the review with a spoiler! In March, 2023, we’ll have another product launch (virtual as the one we tried this year). What can be better than we tried sth and then made it a ritual, right? Mark it on your calendar as we’ll have lot of new stuff to share!
p.s. This New Year poster also comes with a spoiler, for one of our new product. Stay tuned. 🙂
Until next year!
That’s it for this entry. As always, we can’t wait to see what you make. Shoot us a tweet @seeedstudio, or let us know on LinkedIn, Discord, or publish your project on our Project Hub on Hackster. Please be safe out there, be kind to one another, and we’ll see you next month with even more exciting news!
That’s all we have for this year in review! We have nothing but high hopes for the coming year and are, as always, so grateful to greet a new year as part of such a strong community – thank you for another wonderful year of support! We wish you all a 2023 filled with fun, inspiration, and creations.
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