1. Om Technologies Ltd
2. Om Technologies Gta V
3. Technologies Om Weebly Gta 5

The pitfalls of IoT development

We’re all aware of how the surge of open-source has transformed the way we buildsoftware. Nowadays, most successful projects follow the same blueprint - byleveraging collaboration through open-source development, you minimize the timespent on the things that have little to do with your core business. Even if itwas possible to write a smarter database engine or a more efficientserialization protocol than what’s already provided by community collaboration,odds are it won’t be worth your time. As a whole, this is well recognized by thesoftware business.

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Even the embedded Linux world seems to have caught on to this for the most part.However, this does not seem to be the case for the world of sensor nodes andother resource-constrained devices.

In the world of tiny microcontrollers, you still see a lot of business logiccode squeezed into copy pasted vendor HALs, serializing data by memcpy:ingstructs, sending actuation commands via JSON-encoded strings and homebrewedencryption protocols leading to embarassing posts on hackernews.

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Why is this? One factor is that, by tradition, firmware development has had morein common with hardware design than application development. The challengesfaced by embedded developers in the past were perhaps not best solved byobsessing over architectural modularity and leveraging large-scalecollaboration.

But while we still have to troubleshoot noisy clock signals and inexplicablewatchdog resets, it’s not just voltages, registers and pins anymore. You’re alsoexpected to somehow couple the ever-increasing complexity in application logicwith stringent constraints on robustness, power consumption, networkavailability, latency and bandwidth efficiency. Oh and by the way, we alsoexpect you to support remote firmware upgrades, state of the art encryption anda server-facing API that’s easy to work with.

It’s easy to not fully grasp the scope of this, especially since prototyping anIoT product is so incredibly simple - just solder a sensor breakout board to adevkit, wrap it in JSON and pipe the data to some hardcoded static IP over WiFi.If you think you’re 95% done at this point, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprisingif you think you can “wing it” the rest of the way.

But as the project continues and requirements become more clear, you’ll soondiscover that the devil is in the details. There’s endianness bugs in the dataencoding algorithm. You spend hours in meetings with the cloud team discussingprotocol details. Can you send the serial number only once per boot? Should weack RPCs on reception or completion? Do we need a heartbeat? How do we serializethat? The timestamp is in seconds since boot, cloud insists you implement NTP.You realize too late that your SDK doesn’t support DNS. Or encryption. How do weupgrade the firmware? Can we have automatic rollbacks? Should we pause datauplinks while we’re upgrading?

While this picture may be somewhat too bleak, it hopefully serves to illustratethat there are many hidden pitfalls when it comes to architecture and protocoldesign. Pitfalls that take time to discover on your own, time much better spenton focusing on improving the core business logic of your product.

The light at the end of the tunnel

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It’s not that creating IoT products is impossible if you stick to the datedmodel of constantly reinventing the wheel. But we believe it’s possible to buildproducts that are more efficient, more stable, more secure, more flexible, morefeatureful AND have a much shorter time to market by adapting a more modernapproach.

Modern products are built using modern development principles: By maximizing useof modular components, collaboratively developed and maintained, communicatingwith each other using APIs and protocols that are well-defined, open and provenby use.

Up until fairly recently, the lack of an active open-source community focusingon resource-constrained devices made this practically impossible. The modularcomponents were mostly proprietary and closely tied to specific hardware and thepopular open protocols were either unsuited for devices running on coin cellbatteries or simply lacked the community traction required for a protocol to beconsidered well established.

The Linux Foundation realized that a unified community is a prerequisite forlarge-scale collaboration and so Zephyr RTOS was introduced. We never get tiredof evangelizing about Zephyr - we believe it’s a truly transformative opensource project that we will continue working with for many, many years to come.If you’re curious about Zephyr, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to chat!

In this article, however, we’d like to give you an introduction to anotherimportant landmark - the Lightweight Machine to Machine protocol (LwM2M).

LwM2M

LwM2M is a fairly recent IoT protocol mainly designed for device management. Itis based on UDP and the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) which, looselyspeaking, is designed as a drop-in replacement for HTTP for situations whereTCP/IP is either infeasible or otherwise undesirable. There exists support forother transports such as SMS and LoRa, but CoAP/UDP is the main use case.

For full disclosure, let’s make it clear that there’s nothing particularilybrilliant about LwM2M - it offers an interface for client/server communications,agreeable addressing semantics for its objects/resource model and not much else.

Of course, LwM2M includes many protocol features that are fantastic(bootstrapping and firmware upgrades), but they’re entirely optional, making thescope of the core protocol rather limited. But the simplicity is exactly whatmakes LwM2M exciting - simple APIs are easier to agree upon and it’s preciselysuch consensus that facilitates collaboration and reusability on a massivescale. Indeed, this is what we’re beginning to see with LwM2M.

Object-resource model

In LwM2M, we model a device as a collection of resources, where conceptuallyrelated resources may belong to the same object. The server addressesresources by their resource path (contained inside the CoAP URI) which takes theform

where brackets denoted an optional component - if the object/resource issingle-instance, the instance ID is omitted.

All resources support one or more operations - read, write, execute and delete,which correspond to the GET, PUT, POST and DELETE operations in CoAP.

Furthermore, the server can observe resources. For instance, we can ask forsensor readings to be reported if it exceeds 2 V or it deviates by more than 10mV compared to the last reported value.

Firmware Over the Air (FOTA)

This is a simple but well-designed API that describes the update state machineas well as the details of the image transfer which can either be “push” (thisessentially gives the server write access to the update partition) or “pull”which leverages the Block Transfer mechanism already present in the CoAPspecification.

When this API is coupled with a modern bootloader that supports automaticrollback, you get an incredibly robust firmware upgrade system essentially thatis essentially plug and play.

Bootstrapping

The Bootstrap API is another optional (but very useful) feature of LwM2M. Inshort, it lets you provision your devices to connect to a bootstrap serverinstead of your “primary” server. The bootstrap server can then providecredentials and configurations based on device-specific information, such aslocation, serial number or device type. The device then disconnects from thebootstrap server and connects to the primary server, using the credentialsand configuration obtained from the previous step.

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While this may sound slightly round-about, it turns out it can be quite useful.It can greatly simplify provisioning if the devices are to be shipped to manydifferent countries, or used by many different customers who each have their owncloud, because they only need to be provided with the credentials for thebootstrap server during production. The “true” server address does not need tobe decided until the time of first deployment, which can potentially be muchlater.

Wrapping up

One key benefit of adapting a widely adopted protocol is that caveats such asdata encoding, timestamp format, state synchronization, heartbeats, etc arealready ironed out. You don’t have to think about how to serialize RPC calls, orhow to ACK them. It’s all in the specification.

Another key benefit is the inter-operability that the OMA object registryenables, which contains definitions for thousands of common use-cases such aslight switches, accelerometers and e-ink displays. The registry also allows forcompanies to register new custom objects at no charge. This means that any LwM2Mdevice connect to any LwM2M server and immediately provide full read/write/execaccess to all its resources - no product-specific schemas or config filesneeded.

Of course, inter-operability also means that many different types of devices canconnect seamlessly to the same server which can potentially streamlineoperations by a lot for companies with diverse device fleets. Think about thatthat for a second - how many dev hours would it currently take in order tofully integrate an entirely new line of devices into your cloud solution?

It also helps that high quality, open-source reference implementations for bothdevice and server are readily available. Setting up a demo server with a fullyfunctional device management UI literally takes minutes.

We’ve only mentioned a few of the features provided by the LwM2M specification,so in a way we’re just scratching the surface of the LwM2M protocol. On theother hand, there’s conceptually very little about LwM2M to “get”. LwM2M issimply telling you: “Hi, here’s a common API. If you adhere to it, you will inreturn get access to the work done by everyone who is also adhering to thisAPI”. It’s nothing magic - it’s just an invite to collaborate.

We’re still in the early stages of adoption (the protocol was officiallyreleased in 2017), but it’s already very much suited for industrialization, aswe’ve most recently shown by helping Voi deploy it to thousands of theirscooters world-wide.

If we’ve managed to pique your interest, don’t hesitate to give us a call, ordrop us an e-mail!