Embedded software development is undergoing significant transformation – and trending toward greater complexity – driven in large part by the transition from conventional embedded systems to Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The move toward IIoT has broad implications, including cybersecurity mandates, edge computing, greatly expanded connectivity and opportunities to leverage machine learning (ML). Most Impactful Embedded Development TrendsFrom where I sit, six trends are most impactful – certain to quickly reshape product development in the near term and beyond. They are…
Monday, October 30, 2023 - 12:55
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D., Stephanie Van Ness
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UX Design, designing for embedded, medical device
As a result of ongoing digital transformation, many industrial and IoT devices have small, embedded computer touch screens for control of the device. These screens are in the ballpark of small tablet-sized or smartphone-sized screens or even smaller than a phone screen. Designing the interface for those small, embedded screens is a challenge, but one that our team has experience and confidence in.
You might be thinking: Small screens on smartphones are everywhere! It’s a well understood practice!
That's true. But small embedded screens are significantly different to design for than…
When you are a 3D printing hobbyist like me, every morning is like Christmas: you set your printer before hitting the pillows and then go downstairs the next morning to discover what amazing things have appeared. At the moment, in my house it’s usually articulated dragons that come right off the print bed ready to move around.
I currently have a printer farm with four machines running around the clock, working their mechanical hearts out for me. So Christmas comes nearly every day.
But there’s a dark side – sometimes I get coal in my stocking. Ok, not actual coal but a tangled mess of…
Are you working on a project involving connected devices and the Internet of Things, aka IoT? The number of fielded devices varies wildly among projects, so a particular project could encompass anything from a handful to millions of devices. Connected devices can be things like smart TVs, smart watches, home voice controllers, connected cameras, smart light bulbs and thermostats. You get the idea.
I want to discuss fielded devices connected to a central server – in this case, the AWS IoT Core service. For every IoT project, these fielded devices need to run software to connect to IoT…
During its lifetime, a connected device will need to be provisioned, deployed, maintained and eventually, decommissioned. Choosing the right solution with the right architecture is important to safeguard the long-term management viability of your fleet of connected devices. But there’s an issue: these systems are complex and there is no single, ideal system for IoT devices.
So how do you select a system that is right for your business? You’ll need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of each option as there are trade offs with any system. In this blog, we explore in more detail Torizon,…
Monday, May 23, 2022 - 10:14
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By Sergei Zheleznov, Stephanie Van Ness
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Fleet Management, AWS, IoT
In the last blog in our IoT device fleet management series, we explored device cybersecurity and introduced the concept of device provisioning. In this installment, we look at provisioning in more detail. Every cloud provider, from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offers its own proprietary mechanisms to manage authentication and device provisioning. That means provisioning flows vary and there is no single industry standard.
Despite this, you need the OTA platform and the cloud to coexist in a single ecosystem in order to manage the full…
Monday, May 23, 2022 - 10:01
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By Sergei Zheleznov, Stephanie Van Ness
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IoT, Fleet Management, cybersecurity
The damage a hacker could achieve through compromising a connected home security system, a vehicle, printer, or even a medical device is immense. IoT devices can act as a “back door” to the network that hosts them, enabling a multitude of attacks. The stakes are high and protecting an always-on IoT network is essential.
Security by design, identity management, physical attack security and, critically, trust are among the key ingredients of an effective IoT solution.
Security by Design
Successful security by design takes a holistic view of what happens when a device is attached…
Businesses are increasingly relying on IoT devices to help expand and streamline operations, optimize processes and better engage customers. The trend is so significant that the value of the IoT market is predicted to exceed $1300 billion by 2026.
But relying on IoT devices also means managing them – maintaining, monitoring and updating them. Provisioning, management and telemetry control of diverse IoT devices is a complex task – especially when your fleet includes hundreds, or thousands, of individual devices. There is no single IoT device fleet management solution that addresses all…
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain traction in the technology world. From its humble beginnings in 1999 at MIT, the concept of adding a digital “footprint” to devices that have previously been non-digital has grown by leaps and bounds. The value of the IoT market is predicted to exceed $1300 billion by 2026.
The Challenge of Smart Devices
Common devices such as thermostats, ovens and toasters are getting the “smart” device treatment as manufacturers add computing power to their offerings. One of the primary challenges to making smart devices is understanding in what…
Continuing our series on IoT device fleet management, let’s talk about requirements around over-the-air (OTA) updates. Distributed IoT device requirements are crucial for the dispersed systems that need to support remote connectivity, data transfer, and firmware or software version update.
The most important requirements, as described in the graphic below, revolve around the following:
Security and integrity
Usability
Fault tolerance and recovery
Integration
These requirements feed into the essential characteristics of a successful OTA strategy:
An OTA update should never…
Let’s talk about the importance of fleet management. First, a few definitions.
IoT: Internet of Things. Physical objects that are able to connect over the internet. These objects must be equipped with sensors, processing capability and software.
Fleet: a collection of fielded IoT devices.
Device: any internet-connected device with a microcontroller or a processor, for instance temperature sensors, coffee machines, drinks/snacks/candy vending machines, cars, planes, security cameras, industrial robots, and MRI and EKG machines.
Fleet management is essential – I can’t stress this enough! –…
A successful IoT solution will typically provide the capacity to remotely obtain and update its own software, for instance a new UI feature, a background task or an operating system update. But, to allow for these types of updates, adequate capabilities must first be put in place during the development phase.
About Over-the-Air Updates
This remote updating feature is commonly called over-the-air (OTA) updates as most devices provide wireless links, such as WiFi, LoRa and cellular. (OTA updates also apply to wired setups used in many industries.) An effective OTA service provides…
Friday, September 17, 2021 - 09:09
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By Stephanie Van Ness, ICS Development Team
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cybersecurity, connected device
Ransomware attacks — in which hackers break into private computer systems to encrypt and often steal files to hold for ransom — today are so prolific they’re considered a major national security issue. In 2020 alone, ransomware cost victims in the U.S. an estimated $1.4 billion.
Sadly, there is no shortage of instances, including attacks on Universal Health Services, which has more than 400 locations; The Colonial Pipeline, responsible for the country’s largest fuel pipeline; JBS, one of the world's largest meat processors; not to mention those on myriad schools, government agencies,…
Flutter is an open source cross-platform application framework created by Google used to create applications for mobile, desktop and web from a single code base. It sounds like a very interesting proposition: write once, run everywhere. The question though is how Flutter behaves when we need to create more than a web-like experience.
For example, what happens when we need to use an iPhone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities? NFC is a set of communication mechanisms between two electronic devices over a distance of about an inch-and-a-half (4 cm) or less. It enables…
A private network is where your business logic lives, including your data and your customer’s data in the form of servers, disks, databases. For this reason it is of utmost importance to secure your private network accordingly. This goal can be achieved using subnets, firewalls, private endpoints, in-transit encryption, and logs.
A VPC, or virtual private cloud, is AWS’ version of a private network. A VPC is usually composed of a number of subnets, all in the cloud. To safeguard it, there are a number of techniques you can utilize — but the most fundamental involves breaking your VPC…
The importance of encryption in today’s computing environments is self-evident. You can — and most often should — encrypt your data in the cloud. The goal of encryption, which turns data into an unintelligible scramble or cipher, is to prevent secrets from becoming known to unauthorized people and institutions. As such, only authorized people — those who possess the decryption key — are able to turn the cipher back into readable information.
Encryption generally can be applied to data at rest and in transit. At-rest encryption is used mainly for disks, databases, snapshots, machine images,…
IT disasters and attacks can be really expensive. Preparedness is the key to recovering with minimal (or none!) of the following: lost revenue, business disruption, damage to reputation, data loss and downtime. Developing an understanding of high availability, fault tolerance, recovery point objective, recovery time objective and disaster recovery is the first step in safeguarding your business from an IT perspective.
Key Definitions
Before we explore the main strategies for disaster recovery, let’s first define a few fundamental concepts.
Disaster
These include events like fires,…
Choosing the right GUI framework for your microcontroller (MCU) target can be a make it or break it decision for achieving your product goals. Your GUI framework needs to be able to produce a great-looking UI. But, it can’t take all the resources needed for the product to be functional. We’ve put together this blog to offer some guidance to help in your decision making.
Before you select a GUI framework, you should have at least a short list of target hardware. Since there is a wide variety of MCU platforms, not all hardware may be supported by a particular vendor. That’s why it’s…
Microcontrollers are transforming consumer goods, industrial automation, infrastructure and more — essentially reshaping how we interact with the world around us. Exciting stuff! Let me share with you some of the capabilities of Qt for MCUs, as well as offer an at-a-Glance reference. It’s a great resource if you’re considering incorporating microcontrollers into your next device.
Qt for MCUs
This latest offering from our partner The Qt Company, addresses a real need in the marketplace for sophisticated development tools and frameworks that are still in their infancy in the MCU world.…
In this post I'll discuss the new offering from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi Pico. It is an interesting product that combines two technologies of great interest: the Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers.
What is a Microcontroller?
A selection of microcontrollers
ICS is currently running a blog series on microcontrollers. Part 1 offers a good overview of what microcontrollers are and how they are reshaping product development. A microcontroller is significantly different from a general purpose computer like a desktop, laptop, or even the Raspberry Pi…
If you want to design and develop a device that includes a next-gen microcontroller (MCU), there are four key areas around which you’ll have to make important decisions:
Hardware development
Display
Software development environment
RTOS
At ICS, almost 25% of every project we work on includes at least one microcontroller in the system and many, if not most, incorporate several. Let me walk you through some of the key decision areas.
1. Hardware Development
If you buy a MCU — unless you purchase one of the NXP or STM evaluation boards — you basically get a chip that can…
Microcontrollers, often referred to as MCUs, are transforming our lives. Perhaps you haven't noticed since the mobile revolution initiated with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 gets all the attention. And rightly so. By putting a supercomputer in everyone's pocket, Apple without question altered society.
But that's old news. Today, transformation is all about the "smart" revolution. And microcontrollers are playing a leading role. By 2023, according to Cisco AIR, there will be nearly 30 billion connected devices in a world with a global population of 8 billion.
To help you explore the…
After a hiatus of more than a year, I wanted to pick up this blog series and cover another GPIO library available on Linux. Since the last time I wrote on this topic, this library has become more widely supported and available on platforms like the Raspberry Pi, so the time was right to explore it further.I mentioned in an earlier blog post that the GPIO sysfs interface was being deprecated in favor of a new GPIO character device API. In this blog post we'll look at libgpiod, a C library and tools for interacting with the Linux GPIO hardware.And yes, it is a library and not a daemon…
In this third installment of the blog series on FreeRTOS, we'll look at some sample code and I'll present some ways you can get started on various platforms. And if you're enjoying this series, be sure to register for our live webinar An Introduction to FreeRTOS, which will run Thursday, February 11 at 1 pm EST.
Code Example (Arduino)
The following is a simple but complete C++ program taken from the FreeRTOS Arduino examples that uses the version of FreeRTOS for the popular Arduino microntroller platform (I'll have more to say about this later).
It runs two tasks - one to blink…
In this second installment of our series on FreeRTOS, we take a more detailed look at its key features, supported platforms, licensing and cost. I'll also note other variants of FreeRTOS, as well as some add-on tools and libraries.
In contrast to a full operating system, FreeRTOS is designed to be a tiny kernel with a small memory footprint, low overhead, and fast execution. It is scalable in size, as small as 9 kilobytes if only a task scheduler is needed. A single-source code base supports more than 40 MCU architectures and 15 toolchains, including the latest RISC-V and…
In this blog post, the first of a three-part series, I'd like to introduce FreeRTOS, a popular and freely available Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). You may not be familiar with the concept of an RTOS or why you would use one, so we'll cover that in this first installment.
What is FreeRTOS?
FreeRTOS is a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) kernel for embedded devices. Primarily targeted at microcontrollers, it has been ported to over 35 different microcontroller platforms. It is free software, distributed under a very liberal MIT License, although there are commercial licensing and support…
My last post, part 4 in the GPIO Programming series, showed some ways to program GPIO from Python. Python offers a number of advantages as a programming language including a short learning curve, no need for compilation, and the availability of many add-on modules. However, true compiled languages like C or C++ can offer some advantages in embedded applications, such as higher performance. Because you are working closer to the level of the hardware you don't have to worry about what a JIT compiler or interpreter might be doing. If desired, you can look at the compiler's generated code or…
Yearly growth of the wearable tech market is predicted to increase 23% to over $100B by 2023 and over $150B by 2026, according to IDTechEX. The Apple Watch stands at the front of the pack with 20 million new watches shipped in 2018. Yet, it was just a year ago that analysts suggested that the wearables market was on the decline, fading quickly after bursting onto the scene with great fanfare. Why this pessimistic view? A large presence by wearables firms was noticeably absent from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2018, spurring analysts to wonder whether the trendy…