Microcontroller Choice

The choice of microcontroller is particularly important in what we are planning to achieve, and of course there are several options, but we are pursuing the one that provide easy OTA firmware updates with an extremely low power functionality.

• STM32 with ESP8266 which can be designed to get firmware updates from the either a mobile application or an encoded firmware transfer in the flash memory which will be executed by the CPU.
• nRF52 series SoC is one of the chipsets by Nordic semiconductor designed for low energy solutions, the choice on nRF series will help us achieve our over the air firmware updates more faster with Bluetooth low energy DFU handler that would be added to the bootloader.

                                               nRF52 Development Kit

Battery management is designed for rechargeable battery that monitors the charging cycles to protect and continually manage the charging circuit, which will constantly provide information and performance details based on the condition of the battery.

One of the mechanisms to use is a cell to cell balancing to achieve a uniform state of charge, other functionality is state-of-charge estimation, over-charging, and over-discharge protection.

Part of our plan for the implementation is to use Lithium-ion batteries rechargeable after 1-2 weeks through a direct AC to DC adapter.