Netatmo is a French startup founded in 2011 that specializes in smart weather stations, thermostats, and cameras. The company was the winner of the CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards three years in a row, and their desire to change the world with smarter technologies has led them to work closely with ST since the conception of their first product.
Doing Big Things With Micro Machines
One of the best examples of that partnership is their weather station for smartphones that allows users to quickly access detailed indoor and outdoor conditions. Using ST’s MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensors, the station can measure temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, carbon dioxide
levels, and even ambient noise to offer consumers the ability to improve their living conditions, make adjustments to their personal space and live a healthier lifestyle.
As Romain Cazalis, Head of Hardware Design at Netatmo explains :
“After closely studying the market, we found ST had powerful MEMS sensors, such as accelerometers, barometers, microphones, etc. The prices were also competitive, and we’ve come to trust their tech and sales teams, which are extremely reactive and supportive.”
Experiment with a whole catalog of MCUs
The weather station uses the STM32L series microcontrollers (MCUs) to quickly process the data gathered by the different sensors and offer a low-powered, real-time computing system that can interface with the different connected mobile devices to deliver the information gathered by the weather station securely and reliably. STM32L1 series MCUs offer a Cortex®-M3 32-bit ARM® architecture, which means Netatmo doesn’t have to be limited by the typical 8-bit systems that are so often used in prototypes, only to find insurmountable performance constraints.
Furthermore, because the STM32 L1 is pin-to-pin compatible with the different STM32F series MCUs, engineers can choose more powerful or lower consumption components, and quickly update their systems to make them compatible with the chip that better fits their needs. As Romain Cazalis also stated:
“We are very pleased about our collaboration with ST. We develop smart innovations that bring clear added value for our users. To make good products that are easy to use and to install, we are very demanding with our suppliers and pay a lot of attention to all the stages of our products’ conception.
We chose ST as our partner as they propose a very wide choice of ARM® Cortex® microcontrollers: they have hundreds of references, from M0 to M7 cores, from tiny packages to large ones, they have all sizes of RAM and Flash and a complete set of peripherals. What’s more, many of those CPUs are pin to pin compatible so it is easy for us to upgrade with minimal hardware and software changes.”
In the end, what makes ST’s components special is that together, they offer a value that is greater than the sum of each part.
To check out Netatmo’s amazing advancements, please visit their website. You can also learn more on ST’s site about our MEMS sensors and MCUs.
