Tactigon: The Journey from an ST Reference Design to Your Hands

The Tactigon is a very small board (49.9 mm x 15.2 mm x 5.5 mm or 2″ x 0.6″ x 0.2″) packed with ST sensors, such as the LPS25HB barometer, the LIS3MDL magnetometer, or the LSM6DS3 six-axis inertial module, among others. It’s the first project of its kind by Next Industries, a young Italian startup that traditionally focuses on industrial sensors for building monitoring as well as real-time tracking of massive infrastructures such as pipelines or environments prone to landslides, for instance.

The Tactigon is an Arduino board that engineers can use as a remote control, an interface for virtual or augmented reality, or as a wearable device. The presence of an STM32L151VE microcontroller (MCU) means applications benefit from 512 kB of Flash, 80 kB of RAM, and a Cortex-M3 core running at 32 MHz that offers an interesting computational throughput to really drive the Tactigon. Similarly, BlueNRG-MS facilitates connectivity to a smartphone as we already saw with the Snuza Pico, thanks to a high-output power of +8 dBm. Yet, both the MCU and the Bluetooth module have an ultra-low power consumption to ensure products such as the Tactigon can do more while using a small battery. Nevertheless, beyond the specifications, what attracted us the most was the story behind the Tactigon and how this company went from paper to product in a relatively short time. 

Link- https://blog.st.com/tactigon-wesu-wearable/