Mikroe rents development hardware on-line for live remote project work
Author: EIS Release Date: Dec 13, 2021
MikroElektronika, the development hardware company behind Click boards and mikroBUS, has put suites of its high-end development boards on-line to offer them as rentable remote hardware – known as ‘hardware as a service’, and in this case called ‘Planet Debug’.
Mikroe inside Planet debug
This is not simulated hardware, but real hardware on which user code can be developed and debugged, controlled remotely through Mikroe’s Necto Studio IDE (integrated development environment).
Mikroe Planet Debug diag“For designers still evaluating many different hardware approaches, or if they require, perhaps 10 days development time, they can reserve time on one of over 74 development boards on Planet Debug stations for $4 a day,” said Mikroe CEO Neb Matic. “We’ll configure it for them with the MCU, peripheral and display combination they want to try, and they can begin developing the next day. The beauty of it is that, through Necto, you are seeing real images of real boards in real time – this is not a simulation.”
Mikroe planet-debug screensMatic also sees this being used to ‘try before you buy’, allowing the appropriate combination of the company’s development boards, MCU cards and Click peripheral boards to be whittled down before purchase. And “Planet Debug is great for students”, according to Mikroe. “In the education environment, resources can be shared and there is no configuration required to bring up a system.”
Currently, there are Planet Debug facilities at Mikroe in Belgrade, in the nearby University of NoviSad, in Minnesota, in Mexico, and an Asian installation is in the pipeline. All facilities can be reserved by anyone from anywhere in the world.
“Hardware-as-a-service is the future of design,” said CEO Matic. “It’s hard for people to grasp right now because there are so many pieces to the puzzle: the peripheral boards, MCU cards, development boards and Necto, but the logical end-game for us was always to combine them in the Planet Debug platform.”