Born out of MATRIX Labs MATRIX Creator is an round-shaped add-on board for Raspberry Pi with a huge number of sensors and features. It is an Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA-driven dev board designed for Raspberry Pi with a Atmel ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, IMU, microphone array, IR, plus Z-Wave and ZigBee communications, and more to allow novice and expert software developers alike to build hardware applications easily.

The Raspberry Pi IoT daughter board, MATRIX Creator, enters the maker world with many "firsts" on the Raspberry Pi:

● The first Raspberry Pi add-on with support for NFC, as well as 802.15.4-compliant short-range wireless radios like Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Thread.
● It’s also the first RPi add-on with 8 MEMs microphone array.
● The board is further touted for being the first RPi add-on with a IR remote receiver/transmitter, and the first with both an ARM MCU and a Xilinx FPGA.

Software



To simplify hardware application development, the MATRIX creator includes MATRIX OS, which allows developers to build hardware applications in just a few lines of code using JavaScript, Python and C++. Users simply select a pre-existing app from the company’s app store, or use it as a foundation for creating their software; alternative, those who prefer coding their hardware from scratch may also do so. Furthermore, developers are able to leverage flexible MATRIX machine intelligence and computer vision libraries including face detection, face recognition, and gesture recognition, with more detection algorithms soon to come.

MATRIX Creator Technical Specifications

● Processor — Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA; Atmel ATSAM3S2C Cortex-M3 MCU
● Wireless:
      ◦ ZigBee
      ◦ Thread
      ◦ Z-Wave
      ◦ NFC reader
● Sensors:
      ◦ Ultraviolet
      ◦ Pressure
      ◦ Humidity
      ◦ Temperature
      ◦ 3D accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer
● Other features:
      ◦ 8x MEMs microphone array
      ◦ RGBW LED light array
      ◦ IR RX/TX for remote controller compatibility
      ◦ Infrared ring for the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera
 ● Other I/O:
      ◦ 2x ADC channels
      ◦ 17x digital GPIOs
      ◦ SPI, I2C, UART

Buying

The Matrix Creator is available for sale at indiegogo with special computer vision kits available from $99 ($112 including shipping). More information may be found at the Matrix Creator product page and indiegogo page.