Introduction to Z-devices - page 1

I want to imagine a future where an entire Arduino or Arduino-like system, including a fast processor, power generation and/or harvesting, and radio (something like BT or WiFi) can be reduced to a single 1mm square chip or smaller.

Sure, it is a bit ahead of our time, but Moore's Law and other market pressures will surely make it happen sooner or later. And perhaps sooner than many of us suspect.

I'll call this hypothetical future chip the "Z-chip".

I want to look at how the existence of such a Z-chip will affect various peripheral devices typically used in Arduino or Arduino-like projects. Like servos, sensors, switches, potentiometers, RTC boards, IMU boards, GPS boards, Displays, and more. Basically almost the entirety of the AdaFruit catalog of peripherals.

Our Z-chip would be small enough and cheap enough to actually package *INSIDE* our various peripheral devices, or added to our various boards. EG, we could put a Z-chip inside the housing of a servo, inside a sensor, inside a potentiometer, inside a pushbutton switch, or *ON* a GPS board, etc.

Every device would then run stand-lone: there is no wiring to a "host" system. Each device is its own host and network server.

And now let's add tremendous intelligence inside each device. Let's pre-load all relevant libraries for each device into its Z-chip. For example, a servo library is pre-loaded into the Z-chip inside the servo, or FFT and voice recognition software is loaded onto the Z-chip inside a microphone. Or graphing libraries pre-loaded on the Z-chip inside a display.

Now the host needs almost no software! It can just send commands out over the network, individualized to each specific device. Like "servo: set angle to 27 degrees" or "gps: return latitude & longitude".

And being independent nodes, these devices can continue to operate long after the host goes away. For example, once we told a motor to run at a speed controlled by a potentiometer, those two devices would continue transmitting between themselves, with no further attention from the rest of the world and no further commands from the host. The two of them could be moved far out of range from the rest of the system, yet would continue to operate as an independent pair.