Brain-Less Board for Mercury System

The set of boards that make up the Mercury System consists of the following “families”:

• Base Board (BB): This is the “brain” of the entire Mercury System and contains the main logic unit, several communication buses and the connectors for interfacing with the slaves. It also contains a simple power supply system and a charging unit for a single LiPo cell (able to meet the power requirements of simpler systems). It can exist in different variants, depending on the microcontroller unit used.

• Modem Board (MB): this is the board that provides network connectivity. It can exist in different variants, depending on the network interface (GSM / GPRS, Wi-Fi, BT, Radio …). It interfaces with the base board via a dedicated serial line.

• Power Board (PB): this is the board that meets the system’s specific power requirements when needed. It can vary depending on the particular power need to be met (high power, solar harvesting, piezoelectric harvesting, etc.).

• Slave Board (SB): these are the system’s peripherals and vary depending on the specific sensor or actuator fitted. Typical examples are SBs with relays, temperature sensors, RGB LED controllers, servo controllers, accelerometers, etc. They communicate with the BB via I2C or UART and a dedicated command set.

• Expansion Board (EB): these are the boards that allow planar connection of Mercury boards. There are variants that can include a display, battery holder, etc.

• Brain-Less Board (BL): these are boards without a controller. In general, they contain very simple sensors or actuators that do not need a bus interface. They are an alternative to slave boards for applications requiring low cost.

Slave Boards and Modem Boards are pre-programmed with firmware that implements a dedicated command set for high-level management, while Base Boards are equipped with a software framework that provides all low-level services (operating system, device drivers, system services, etc.), leaving the user to develop only the application-level logic.

HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer): the purpose of this layer is to abstract hardware dependencies for the upper layers.
SML (System Management Layer): the purpose of this layer is to provide services for managing the communication buses (I2C, UART) and the Modem Board (WiFi, BT, GSM / GPRS). It also provides a set of system services, such as System Power Management, RTCC, USB terminal, etc.
It is divided into two main components:

OSL (Operative System Layer): this layer consists of a lightweight RTOS that provides basic system services, such as scheduling tables for the various tasks, events, SW timers, alarms, etc.

• Mercury System Getting Started Guide IoT and Connectivity Made Simple
• MS_BL810_Datasheet