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We remain focused on giving engineers the flexibility to build with their preferred technologies, exploring new ways to work with data, and enhancing our platform’s existing capabilities.
Let’s dive into this month’s highlights.
Flexibility to build with your preferred technology
LoRaWAN support on Viam
LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a wireless protocol designed to enable low-power, long-range communications for IoT devices. These sensors use minimal power and can run for months or even years on a single battery charge.
LoRaWAN sensors transmit data via radio signals in short bursts, typically every few minutes, which is ideal for many IoT applications. They can also transmit data over much longer distances than traditional WiFi, up to several miles in outdoor environments. WiFi is typically limited to a range of 150 feet.
But while LoRaWAN sensors have clear advantages, it can be complex to deploy and configure a server stack to receive, process, and forward the messages to the appropriate applications.
That’s where Viam’s unique approach comes in, making setting up a LoRaWAN system simple and affordable. With Viam, you can use inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware like a Raspberry Pi to create your own LoRaWAN gateway, then install the Viam software on the same Raspberry Pi with minimal configuration to sync the data to Viam’s cloud. Learn more.
NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Support for ML Models
You can run machine learning models on NVIDIA’s Jetson Orin Nano using Viam. This builds on the promise of Viam as a middleware for your preferred hardware/software for interacting with the physical world, allowing you to ship production-grade hardware such as NVIDIA's embedded GPUs like the Orin Nano without changing your entire application.
The Jetson Orin platform has enabled Viam to build out QuickQueue for UBS Arena by handling 30+ camera streams through AI models.
Expanded support for Go developers
We are excited to expand support for Go developers with the addition of the App Cloud API to the Go SDK. This new feature enables developers to interact seamlessly with the Viam Cloud platform from their Go-based applications. Now the Go SDK supports app, data, data sync, billing, provisioning and ML.
If you want to use Go to write modules, the CLI now supports generating modules in Go. The command is viam module generate.
New ways to work with data
Improvements to the tele-op time-series widget
With recent enhancements to the tele-op time-series widget, users can now display multiple data lines from different components and data from non-sensor components (e.g., motors, boards), as well as customize the data query powering the visualization. Read more about these in-app visualizations and watch this quick video demo here.
API to get the latest captured data point
You can now use the new get_latest_tabular_data API to get the most recently captured sensor data from a specific component or service’s data capture method that has been synced to the cloud.
Continued platform enhancements
Viam's Micro-RDK: Maximizing the potential of embedded systems
Microcontrollers are at the forefront of modern technological innovation, powering everything from home automation devices to industrial machinery. These compact, cost-effective devices integrate processing, memory, and connectivity into a single package, making them ideal for embedded applications and IoT solutions.
However, their limited compute power and memory can pose challenges for handling complex tasks—especially when it comes to gathering, processing, and syncing data efficiently.
Viam’s Micro-RDK provides a versatile development kit designed specifically for microcontrollers. The Micro-RDK simplifies the process of collecting, managing, and utilizing data from sensors and actuators, enabling smarter machine interactions at the edge. Learn more.
Maintenance windows: Avoid downtime due to upgrades
New maintenance windows capabilities enable you to avoid downtime due to upgrades during critical operations. With this new feature, you can configure devices to remain fully operational during business hours, or customer usage periods.
For example, you could have a sensor that only allows upgrades on Sundays from 9pm to 11pm, or whatever window makes sense for your use case. This enables you to better manage your production environments with control mechanisms for safe upgrades.
Bonus: Water-pouring demo
In this demo, the robot arm uses Viam’s APIs and motion planning service to detect cup positions, calculate optimal pouring angles, and execute the precise movements needed for a seamless pour.
Viam is hardware agnostic, allowing you to integrate sensors like Intel RealSense and actuators like xArm seamlessly in a single script, streamlining complex robotic tasks.
Check out the full demo below to see how it all works.
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback and see the incredible things you build with Viam. Sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop and never miss a thing.
