Customizable intelligent human-machine interface turns unlimited product design imagination into endless possibilities

Customizable intelligent human-machine interface turns unlimited product design imagination into endless possibilities

Human-machine interface (HMI) technology is rapidly evolving, allowing us to interact with many connected IoT devices and appliances in our homes and workplaces in smarter, easier, and more intuitive ways. Buttons, sliders, and dials are now considered "old fashioned," and even touch panels are being enhanced and replaced by voice control and other touch-free HMI technologies. With the explosion of smart speakers and voice assistants in recent years, we have embraced and enjoyed the convenience of voice control. And this is just the beginning.

Chips, software, and machine learning (ML) technologies are constantly being developed to enable a smarter world with all kinds of HMI possibilities. ML-enabled edge devices that support voice, face, and gesture recognition are emerging in an endless stream, greatly simplifying the way we control and interact with increasingly intelligent IoT devices. Welcome to the world of smart human-machine interface (Smart HMI).

To accelerate the large-scale transformation of HMI, NXP has launched a Smart HMI solution that helps you add local voice control, voice recognition, face and gesture recognition to a variety of smart home products, white appliances, small appliances, building automation equipment and industrial IoT applications at a lower cost and more simply. With the support of NXP EdgeReady Smart HMI solution, OEMs can now differentiate their IoT products through new smart interface functions while accelerating product launch time.

Imagine: refrigerators, ovens, washers and dryers, floor-standing air conditioners, thermostats, universal remote controls, home entertainment systems, and countertop appliances from coffee makers to food processors—all controlled through an intuitive combination of voice commands, gestures, and facial recognition. Smart HMI technology can also enable contactless interfaces for elevators, medical equipment, payment terminals, door locks, and other building access.

Traditionally, developing advanced HMIs on your own is challenging and complex, often requiring a long learning curve or specialized knowledge of ML/AI, machine vision, and speech recognition technologies. The NXP EdgeReady Smart HMI solution is a game changer for mainstream embedded developers looking to add voice and vision technologies to their IoT products. Backed by NXP’s end-to-end support, it provides developers of all skill levels with an all-inclusive HMI solution that includes a variety of hardware, software, tools, and examples to take them from concept to mass production in just a few months.

All HMI-optimized features of the i.MX RT117H crossover MCU are integrated into one solution. Learn more about the Smart HMI solution and get started.

At the heart of the Smart HMI solution is the SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit, which features NXP's i.MX RT117H microcontroller (MCU). As part of the i.MX RT1170 family of crossover MCUs, the i.MX RT117H targets cost-sensitive HMI use cases . The MCU's dual-core architecture uses NXP's advanced technology, with an Arm® Cortex®-M7 core operating at up to 1 GHz and an energy-efficient 400 MHz Cortex®-M4 core, providing ample performance and real-time responsiveness for edge ML and HMI multitasking. The i.MX RT117H is licensed to run NXP's facial biometric verification, audio front-end real-time runtime library, and ML speech engine. The MCU features all-inclusive vision/speech algorithms, graphical display UI capabilities, memory resources, and on-chip peripherals, giving developers the flexibility to define and customize their products for different HMI use cases.

The SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit comes with fully integrated production-grade software and NXP's one-stop support to minimize time to market, reduce risk and development effort. The kit uses a versatile, cross-platform framework that supports face and gesture recognition, far-field voice recognition, and high-quality 2D graphics display. Developers can customize these HMI components to meet the needs of a variety of smart appliances, smart homes, smart buildings, and industrial IoT applications. The kit is able to perform face/gesture recognition and voice control locally and completely offline on the i.MX RT117H MCU, minimizing user privacy, security, and latency issues associated with cloud-based implementations.

The Smart HMI Development Kit combines silicon, software and IP from NXP and leading third-party partners. The kit's production-grade hardware is optimized for a small form factor to reduce costs and comes pre-integrated with fully tested software and wireless, display and camera drivers. The comprehensive kit includes design files with schematics, bill of materials (BOM), layout and documentation, and is supported by NXP's mainstream MCUXpresso SDK. Smart coffee machine, elevator controller and smart home panel application demonstrations provide a fast out-of-the-box experience to help you accelerate development. NXP provides a single point of contact for customer support, simplifies licensing of all NXP and third-party software, and simplifies the procurement of NXP parts.

Adding Smart HMI to Next-Generation IoT Products

It is now easier than ever to add machine vision, face/gesture recognition and local voice control capabilities to IoT applications. To learn more about NXP EdgeReady Smart HMI solutions, SLN-TLHMI-IoT development kit and i.MX RT117H MCU, please visit nxp.com.

author:

Lin Ming

Product Director, Edge Processing Division, NXP Semiconductors

Ming Lin leads the Solution and Innovation team of NXP's Edge Processing Division, driving solution definition, development and go-to-market strategy, focusing on AI/ML vision and voice, security and connectivity technologies. In 2013, Ming Lin joined Freescale as a product line manager for Kinetis L and later as a product manager for i.MX 6UL application processors. In 2020, he joined NXP again and served in the Solution Innovation team of the Edge Processing Division. Ming Lin has more than 20 years of engineering and marketing experience in MCU, MPU and wireless connectivity products.