The toolchain and software have been designed to help employ the ISPU to handle motion-related workloads such as activity recognition and anomaly detection directly in the sensor. This helps to reduce system power and latency, offloading the local microcontroller, as well as controlling the behaviour of the sensor to the application.
Using the ISPU toolchain, developers can programme the sensor’s intelligent processing unit using the C programming language and they can choose to work from a command line interface (CLI) or an Eclipse-based environment like STM32CubeIDE, and to use a graphical user interface (GUI) such as AlgoBuilder and Unicleo.
The X-CUBE-ISPU software package contains templates and example projects as well as ready-to-use libraries that help developers quickly understand how to use and programme the sensors’ ISPU and can be used as a starting point to implement custom algorithms. Pre-built files are also available, which let users load the X-CUBE-ISPU examples directly into the sensor using one of the GUIs, with no coding required. In addition, a GitHub repository is available providing more examples, tutorials, and other development resources.
Using these resources will, according to ST, simplify and speed up the development of applications such as personal electronics including wearable devices for activity recognition and health monitoring, as well as industrial devices such as asset trackers, equipment-condition monitors, robots, and machine controllers.
ST’s ISM330IS and LSM6DSO16IS inertial modules contain an always-on 3D accelerometer and 3D gyroscope with the embedded ISPU. They feature low power consumption, drawing as little as 0.46mA in low-power mode, and low noise at 70μg/√Hz in high-performance mode. Sensor hub functionality allows them to collect data from up to four additional external sensors. An embedded temperature sensor is also included, and each device is housed in a compact 2.5mm x 3mm x 0.83mm plastic land grid array (LGA) package.
The ISPU-toolchain, X-CUBE-ISPU and GitHub model zoo are available free of charge from ST.
