390: Irresponsible At the Time

Tyler Hoffman joined us to discuss the issues associated with embedded devices at consumer scale. We talked about firmware update, device management, and remote diagnostics for millions of devices.

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. (We will invite Tyler back to talk about embedded tools but someone was preparing a lecture on firmware update and device management.)

Tyler writes for Memfault’s Interrupt blog which has excellent advice including the mentioned article about Defensive Programming. You can also find him and Memfault on Twitter: @ty_hoff, @Memfault.

Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at ClasspertX, a high-quality MOOC with video lectures, quizzes, exercises, synchronous discussions classes, and a portfolio-worthy final project. The alpha cohort starts in early November and the course will run again in Q1 2022.

196: Software Server Thingybob

Aditi Hilbert (@HilbertAditi) spoke with us about MyNewt, an Apache-licensed RTOS and bootloader.

MyNewt’s Apache page is mynewt.apache.org and the github repository is github.com/apache/incubator-mynewt-core. In the README.md, check out the section marked browsing which points to the file system, ble stack, and assorted other source code goodies you may want to read. The secure bootloader code is also in there but as it is also a cross-RTOS effort (with Linux’s Zephyr), you can find the MCUBoot repository at github.com/runtimeco/mcuboot

Aditi works for Runtime.io (@runtime_io), a primary contributor to MyNewt. They work with companies who want to use MyNewt on their products.

We talked about OIC (openconnectivity.org) and using UDP endpoints over BLE. Constrained http is actually called constrained application protocol: CoAP (coap.technology). We also mentioned MQTT, an older standard attempting to solve some of the same problems.

The Apache license is one of the most permissive of open source licenses: choosealicense.com/licenses

Assorted other links discussed in the show: