AMBER: Advanced Mother Board for Embedded systems pRototyping

The proliferation of low-cost embedded system platforms has allowed the creation of large communities of developers, as well as the development of new advanced applications. Even though some of these applications can be of industrial relevance, their immediate application to real products is not straightforward since most of them require a complete and expensive hardware redesign of the considered embedded solution. To speed up the technological transfer of custom embedded solutions while overtaking the limits imposed by a complete hardware redesign, the article presents AMBER, an innovative embedded platform leveraging on a design based on System-on-Modules (SOM) and Extender modules. AMBER decouples the processing part of the system, which is fully contained on the SOM, from the peripherals, which are contained on the main board and Extender modules. This allows a smooth industrial-oriented redesign of the embedded solution. In the article, AMBER is first presented starting from its philosophy and design choices while highlighting its main features. Then, an application of AMBER as an enhanced gateway to be used in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenario is reported by considering a monitoring and actuation use case. The IIoT-oriented AMBER solution is hardware and software configured to support real-time communications with actuators compliant with the Powerlink standard, as well as to interact with sensors compliant with Bluetooth Low Energy. Performance results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution in the selected industrial scenario while promoting a fast and immediate transfer in new embedded products targeted to IIoT applications.