A crystal-free architecture of a low-power wireless node allows for a small and cheap design. The Single-Chip micro Mote (SCuM) is the first crystal-free mote-on-chip to be compatible with standards such as Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE802.15.4, and develops as a collaboration between Kris Pister's team at UC Berkeley and Thomas Watteyne's team at Inria. This keynote will go through our 2019-2020 research journey around the SCuM chip. We start by detailing why a "crystal-free" architecture is

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... ch as radical move away from traditional lowpower wireless radio design. We discuss the challenges of calibration and compensation in these designs, and show how we get a SCuM chip to communicate with off-the-shelf motes and participate in a standards-based IoT network. We then present an unexpected use case that crystal-free motes enable: tracking Asian hornets as they fly from a beehive back to their nest. We illustrate this presentation with numerous videos and hands-on experience. We finish this talk by discussing why crystal-free micro-robots are the next frontier of IoT research, addressing all open IoT networking research questions at once, which a tremendous potential for pioneering applications such as micro-wearables and swarm robotics. This keynote is tailored to the advanced researcher or engineer in embedded system, IoT and low-power wireless. It draws on recent activities within Inria's EVA team (team.inria.fr/eva/), UC Berkeley's Pister lab (bamlab.berkeley.edu) and their collaborative project around crystalfree architectures (www.crystalfree.org).