Digi-Key Electronics, headquartered in Thief River Falls, Minn., USA, is an authorized global, full-service distributor of electronic components, offering more than 9 million products, with over 1.7 million in stock and available for immediate shipment, from over 800 quality name-brand manufacturers. Digi-Key also offers a wide variety of online resources such as EDA and design tools, datasheets, reference designs, instructional articles and videos, multimedia libraries, and much more. Technical support is available 24/7 via email, phone and webchat. Additional information and access to Digi-Key’s broad product offering can be found by visiting www.digikey.com.
Situation
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a leading driver of engineering activity among Digi-Key’s customers. In response, Digi-Key crafted developer tools and offerings around processors, wireless modules, gateways, sensors and cellular data plans to position Digi-Key as a one-stop-shop for IoT resources, products, and solutions.
Digi-Key was making it easier to identify and purchase the parts needed to develop a solution, and was also providing helpful resources and documentation. But the inherent firmware and software complexity in building complete end-to-end IoT systems remains daunting for all but the most sophisticated, expert development teams.
Collaboration
Digi-Key saw an opportunity to offer its customers an easy-to-use, integrated development environment (IDE) tailored to the needs of the mass market of Internet-of-Things developers. Digi-Key partnered with Atmosphere IoT Corp. to create a custom, branded version of the Atmosphere IoT Platform, an innovative, low-code software platform for rapid application development and deployment of sensor-to-cloud IoT solutions.
In the fall of 2018, the two teams labored together to quickly create a solution that provided seamless single sign on (SSO) access for Digi-Key’s vast online registered user community. Anyone registered as a user at www.digikey.com can gain quick access to the DK IoT Studio by visiting www.digikey.com/iotstudio.
In less than three months, the Digi-Key branded DK IoT Studio was up and running. The new cloud-based services offering was successfully unveiled at the Elektronica trade show in Munich, Germany in November 2018.
The DK IoT Studio masks the complexity behind numerous hardware vendors’ SDKs, APIs and drivers, and is integrated into Digi-Key’s familiar shopping cart e-commerce system. Using an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface, IoT developers can quickly generate device firmware, a mobile app and web application in minutes, with little or no manual coding required.
The solution expands Digi-Key’s appeal to a large addressable audience of 10M IoT-related developers, many of which may be more web or mobile savvy and do not yet have any preferred electronics vendors.
Building Success
In less than 12 months from its original launch, thousands of developers have used DK IoT studio to build projects, and DK IoT Studio has rapidly expanded to support more than one hundred IoT building blocks. Users can connect a range of low power, low cost microcontrollers and digital MEMS sensors using a range of wireless connectivity options, including BLE, WiFi, Cellular, LoRA, Sigfox, ZigBee alongside traditional wireline serial and Ethernet data networking.
Atmosphere offers IoT solution builders the fastest and simplest way to build, connect, and manage complete sensor-to-cloud solutions. First released in January 2015, its innovative low-code software development platform has been used by thousands of IoT developers to create smart, wireless-enabled products and solutions. Atmosphere IoT Corp. was founded in late 2017 from Anaren, Inc.’s Internet of Things Group.
