Flutter
is an open source ARM-powered wireless Arduino with 1000m+ (3200 ft) range and
256-bit AES hardware encryption.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a wireless electronics development platform based on Arduino. With over 3200ft (1km) of usable range, a powerful ARM processor, and integrated encryption, Flutter makes it easy for you to build projects that communicate across the house, across the neighborhood, and beyond.Whether you want to check the temperature of a beer-brewing setup, have your mailbox send you a text message when the mailman arrives, control a swarm of flying robots, or just turn on your lights with your phone, Flutter gives you the range, power, and flexibility to do it.
We’re not just building circuit boards though. Our goal is simple: make it easier for engineers, makers, builders, and hackers to go farther with their projects than ever before. Even if it's their first time. We’re going to arrange and keep a set of basic electronics tutorials so getting started with Flutter is as easy as possible.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a wireless electronics development platform based on Arduino. With over 3200ft (1km) of usable range, a powerful ARM processor, and integrated encryption, Flutter makes it easy for you to build projects that communicate across the house, across the neighborhood, and beyond.Whether you want to check the temperature of a beer-brewing setup, have your mailbox send you a text message when the mailman arrives, control a swarm of flying robots, or just turn on your lights with your phone, Flutter gives you the range, power, and flexibility to do it.
We’re not just building circuit boards though. Our goal is simple: make it easier for engineers, makers, builders, and hackers to go farther with their projects than ever before. Even if it's their first time. We’re going to arrange and keep a set of basic electronics tutorials so getting started with Flutter is as easy as possible.
Getting Connected
Creating Flutter networks is easy, even if it’s just two boards. Specify networks in Arduino code or configure Flutter with our mobile app. Once configured, devices can enter and exit the network seamlessly. This makes it extremely easy to set up a network at home (or anywhere else) where all of your projects can reliably communicate. Flutter is like a second network for your devices.Multiple options
Building wireless projects shouldn’t have to be expensive. Flutter was built from the ground up with cost in mind, that’s why our boards start at just $20. We’ve worked hard to keep costs as low as possible and deliver you a quality product you can afford to use in as many projects as you’d like. To accomplish this, we're designing two boards:
Still under development, the Flutter basic is tiny and simple. You get all the features of Flutter (including 1km range) in a circuit board with an low-profile integrated antenna, rather than the large antenna shown in the video. Featuring micro USB for power and programming, components on both sides to reduce size, an LED, and a button, as well as plenty of digital and analog I/O.
Flutter Pro ($30)
Prototypes of this board are what is shown in our video. The Flutter Pro adds battery charging, a professional screw mount antenna, an additional button, and more memory for more code.
Shields
We've designed a handful of shields for
Flutter, focused on getting started and connecting networks. Every Flutter
board that ships comes with our Breakout board and socket headers.
Breakout Board
The Flutter Breakout board is basically a
socket for your Flutter Board, letting you build projects you can easily remove
Flutter from. This is great for projects you don't use all the time! Every
board ordered comes with at least one of these breakouts (with sockets) so you
can get going quickly!
RC Shield
The RC
shield makes it easy to hook up Flutter to a standard hobby R/C car like the
one shown in the video (just two plugs, no soldering).
It's not
just for remote control cars though, the RC shield features a buzzer, DC jack,
a few FETs for switching things on, plugs for 4 R/C servos (for use with
quads), and a temperature sensor.
The FET
switches on the board allow you to easily control LED lights (say, headlights
and tail lights for a car), or just turn on a solenoid valve for watering the
plants.
Features
- 1,000+ meter range
- 1.2 Mbps* max data rate
- 915 MHz operating frequency
- Atmel SAM3s ARM CPU at 64MHz
- Cryptographic key storage
- Mesh networking
- 3.3v system voltage
- 10-40mA current draw (normal use)
One of the most
important features of any wireless system is its range and reliability. We use
wifi every day, but take a few steps down the driveway and coverage quickly
becomes scarce. Flutter is a different kind of wireless system, completely
self-contained with over a half-mile range. This allows for a wireless platform
without borders, and no longer being chained to a router means your projects
are free to follow you out the front door, through the yard, and down the
street.
As with any wireless device, security is extremely important. Since information leaving your antenna can be picked up by anyone nearby (and information coming into your antenna could have come from anywhere) it’s important to have a system in place that verifies who you are talking to in a secure way that’s also easy to use.
To make Flutter as secure as possible, we’re building in special cryptographic hardware and integrating cryptography into every layer of the software, giving the user ultimate control over who can and cannot communicate with their devices.
Integrated Cryptography
In addition to software for handling encryption and decryption of data, flutter uses the cryptographic chip as the hardware element of the security system. Built specifically for use in high security applications, the Atmel ATSHA204 is based around secure storage for protecting your encryption keys.
Using the chip’s features, Flutter networks are able to use extremely strong encryption and other cryptographic techniques to keep your network secure.
Open Source
Flutter’s goal will always be to provide the community with access to inexpensive and reliable wireless technology, and so Open Source was a natural marriage for our project. Every aspect of our system will be made available, from schematics, board designs, the bill of materials, right down to the firmware and mobile app. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to build or improve upon our foundation.
Mesh Networking
Flutter’s wireless technology seamlessly routes messages across multiple devices to reach their final destination. Want to send lots of data across longer distances? Drop another Flutterboard in between and let Flutter handle the rest. Got an ambitious project that requires a huge network? We’ve got you covered there, too. Flutter is designed to scale from two devices to thousands, and our flexible tagging system means you won’t lose track between the lights in your bedroom and the lights in the kitchen.
Versatility & Mobile
Flutter easily connects to other computer networks either via USB to a PC or many modern Android phones, over wifi or ethernet with our Flutter Network Shield, or over bluetooth with our Bluetooth Shield. Bluetooth is especially useful with mobile since it allows your phone to connect directly to the Flutter network without requiring Internet access or a wifi router.
Flutter’s direct USB capability and our comprehensive set of shields means that no matter what you build with Flutter it’s always possible to communicate with the network using your phone.
We plan to develop a free, open source mobile app to provide users with an easy way to configure alerts and display project data on their phone. Use buttons and sliders to send commands to any device or browse and edit your network configuration and device tags, Flutter makes it extremely easy to manage multiple devices.
Potential Applications
You love finding innovative ways to take on everyday tasks, whether it’s dimming your lights with your smartphone, getting text notifications when the doorbell rings or the mail arrives, or even building your own quadcopter. Whatever the task at hand you can rely on Flutter to be versatile and robust enough to take on the challenge:
By connecting simple sensors with Flutter you can easily collect environmental data like temperature or light, water, and humidity levels. Which means you can do anything from measuring the humidity in your greenhouse, to building a wireless beer brewing setup, monitoring the temperature in your grill, monitoring sunlight for solar applications, or even checking the Ph levels in your pool. And that’s just with a couple cheap sensors.
Quadcopters
With its powerful CPU and long range radio, Flutter is an excellent platform for building quadcopters. Flutter’s protocol is designed just as much for reading a few sensors as it is for hardcore robotics applications so the user has ultimate control over what the protocol is doing.
Self-Diagnosis and Spectrum Analyzer
Flutter can even be used to diagnose itself. Because Flutter has bare metal access to the radio hardware, you can easily listen to the radio waves around you and plot the data. We'll even build some of this functionality into the app for basic diagnosis.
RC Cars
Hooking up Flutter to an RC car is dead simple. Whether you just want to drive it with an SNES controller for fun or use it for swarm robotics research, Flutter makes it easy.
Images and Details
Courtsey
Courtsey
Via Kick Starter
