IoT news of the week for April 14, 2023

Emerson is buying National Instruments for $8.2B: Industrials giant Emerson is buying test and measurement company National Instruments for $8.2 billion. Word of the deal surfaced a few weeks back with a few other companies bidding for NI. With this deal, Emerson gets a valuable name in the automation business and adds to its portfolio of industrial automation technology. In 2021, it purchased Aspen Technology and the year before that it bought OSI and Progea Group for their respective industrial automation tech. (Emerson)

What is the deal with Matter? Kevin tried out the new Matter-enabled Nanoleaf Essentials light bulbs and experienced some frustration when it came to getting the devices to work on both iOS and Google Home. But he has great things to say about the bulbs themselves. (Stacey on IoT)

Amazon’s Fire TV is its new smart home play? Daniel Rausch, VP of entertainment devices and services at Amazon, is more familiar to me as the VP of smart home and Alexa, but either way he told Variety’s podcast that televisions are going to have a greater role to play in the smart home and Amazon plans to bring more smart home capabilities to Fire TVs. I have a lot of questions about what this means for Echo Show devices, the developers that have built for the Echo Show, as well as what it means for the inclusion of radios and sensors inside future Fire TVs. I guess I also want to know if Rausch has a new job. (Variety)

The FCC has launched a Space Bureau to handle all the satellites: Now that you can launch of a cluster of cube sats with a few million dollars and lay claim to a constellation, and given that Amazon and Space X both want to put thousands of birds in the thermosphere, the Federal Communications Commission has created a new bureau designed to help process the applications asking to launch more than 60,000 new satellites. Not only will the Space Bureau handle applications, it will also work on figuring out how to use terrestrial wireless spectrum to connect with satellites. Given the race to space, creating a dedicated team to focus on rules and regulations makes sense. (Space News)

Want to work on digital privacy? If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably aware that the IoT can represent a privacy minefield. So far, we’re mostly on our own as consumers, but Consumer Reports is trying to create a privacy label for IoT devices, and it could use some help. It has opened up a call for fellows to “research, test and bring a user centric privacy & cybersecurity nutritional label to life over the course of twelve weeks.” The deadline is April 21, so hop over soon to see if this is something you might want to participate in. (Consumer Reports)

Renesas has designed its first 22-nanometer MCU: When it comes to chip manufacturing, shrinking the space between transistors on the chip is key to boosting performance and reducing energy consumption. High-end processors and memory chips are usually made on a 7-nanometer or 3-nanometer process node. This is overkill for many chips in the IoT, but Renesas has decided to make its first 22-nanometer microcontroller that combines an MCU with a Bluetooth radio. (Renesas)

Nordic has a new flagship SoC for the IoT: Also in chip news, Nordic Semiconductor has released its nRF54H20 system on a chip combining double the processing power of it previous generation SoC with accelerators for machine learning. Nordic says the processors can deliver up to 320 MHz and each processor is optimized for a specific type of workload. The brains get paired with Bluetooth radios that consume half the power of the previous generation of Nordic SoCs. Like, the Renesas chip above, the nRF54H20 is manufactured using the 22 nanometer process node. (Nordic Semiconductor)

This is a kind way to kill a connected device: Monitor-IO was a network monitoring device that provided color-coded information about the status of an owner’s network. But it appears that the company behind the device can’t survive anymore and needs to shut down. Instead of bricking the outstanding devices, it’s offering users a file that they can put on an SD card to keep the device running after the device’s servers go down, and providing code so the community can add more functionality to the device. This is a nice way to close out a niche product. (Ars Technica)