Blues Wireless, a leading provider of embedded cellular solutions, today announced the general availability of Swan, a low-cost embeddable STM32L4+ based microcontroller board designed to accelerate the development and deployment of battery-powered IoT solutions. It is especially useful for applications requiring large memory or a high degree of I/O expandability at an affordable cost, such as edge-based inferencing and remote monitoring. Acting in this role, Swan is designed to be the ideal companion to Blues’s Notecard.
Uniquely for Feather-compatible boards, Swan is designed to satisfy developers’ needs that span from early prototyping through high-volume deployment. Developers may begin to use Swan in conjunction with Adafruit’s myriad sensors and FeatherWing-compatible carriers. Due to its novel design, for high-volume deployment the low-cost Swan can also be soldered directly to a ‘parent’ PCB integrating those sensors, utilizing the full range of Swan’s I/O capabilities.
Based on the powerful STM32L4R5 microcontroller operating at up to 120Mhz, Swan provides developers access to 640KB of RAM, 2MB of flash, and 55 general purpose I/O ports including 8 analog, 16 digital, one SPI, one Quad SPI, two I2C, 4 UART, and one USB. The board has three independent power options – USB, Battery, or Line power – and provides a software-switchable 2 Amp regulator for powering external sensors. When operating in its low-power operating mode, the entire Swan board commonly draws only about 8uA while retaining all of its memory, making it quite suitable for battery-powered devices. Swan features support for C/C++, Arduino, and CircuitPython, and includes a CORTEX Debug connector enabling the use of advanced development environments such as Visual Studio Code, IAR, and STM32CubeIDE.
The Swan is available from shop.blues.io in the single-unit Swan Starter Kit and the Swan Edition of the Notecard Starter Kit for Feather. When paired with a Notecard and with a MOQ, Swan is available below $20, delivered in trays directly to your contract manufacturer.
“While building Notecard-based remote monitoring solutions, customers have repeatedly asked us for recommendations that might help accelerate their creation of highly intelligent battery-powered devices,” said Ray Ozzie, founder, and CEO of Blues Wireless. “To them, there are many impediments. Our core mission is to help them reduce the time from concept-to-deployment and concept-to-value. Swan, as with Notecard, is a unique solution that will accelerate their journey and get them to delivery and scale with enterprise-class security, quality, and robustness.”
Blues Wireless announced the general availability of Swan on September 29th, 2021, at the Edge Impulse Imagine conference, to a worldwide audience both in-person and attending virtually.
