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Get more out of your Rev A hardware

IoT projects and products fail at a spectacularly high rate; not in the field, but by never making it out of the lab. One of the myriad reasons is time to market. When you have a fixed amount of time to make an idea work and deliver that product to the marketplace, you don’t get a lot of retries. That’s why I gave this talk about how to get the most out of your “Rev A” (first revision of) hardware. It was delivered as one of the free talks from the Embedded Online Conference (EOC) in 2023. You can view this and many other highly specialized talks on the EOC site. Registration is required for viewing the other free talks and there is a nominal fee to join the site and view the talks from this year and last year.

Balancing Act

Why not “move fast and break things”? Why bother caring about Rev A? Despite reduced costs around hardware thanks to quick turn manufacturing services domestic and abroad, it’s possible to get hardware fast…but there is still a delay between a Rev A and Rev B board. What’s more, the decisions you make in your early hardware prototypes can carry with you throughout the life of a product, and it makes sense to shoot for a best-case scenario when planning and executing your first spin of a prototype. This talk covered three areas of the prototype process.

Before Rev A

The “before” is all about planning, especially across different teams. Hardware designers for IoT products need to make sure they communicate properly with their firmware and cloud teams, in order to maintain good expectations. A written plan about what you’re hoping to get out of the Rev A prototype and how to maximize the testing of that prototype will ensure you don’t waste or duplicate efforts later. Design reviews are a crucial component to allow different teams to voice their needs before manufacturing.

During Rev A

Once your prototype is planned, designed, and manufactured, you need to execute on your testing plan. Your testing methods will help you to understand when a prototype has met or missed goals set during planning. This part of the talk also reviews some testing tools that can help teams get more data from their prototype device.

After Rev A

Once you have thoroughly tested your Rev A prototype, a post-mortem of what went wrong (and right) is crucial. It will ensure you improve your process (for future Rev A prototypes) and also capture all of the needed changes for a Rev B prototype.

Case Study

Golioth does not build and sell finished hardware products.  But we do regularly create “Rev A” hardware when we create different Reference Designs. These are built to help accelerate teams looking to build an end product but wouldn’t mind benefiting from someone else showing how to build the first spin of a design. Our Reference Designs are built on top of a prototyping platform we created that attempts to balance flexibility, a quasi-finished look, and a relatively compact design. None of these categories are super optimized, as that is left up to the user hoping to build a finished product.

We’re always looking for new Reference Designs to build to help accelerate engineers’ Rev A prototypes. If you have any requests or need help building out your prototype, let us know on our forum or drop us a note.

Conference Talk Slides

 

 

 

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Free Zephyr Training on July 12th

Come learn Zephyr with Golioth on July 12th, 2023! You will need to order your own hardware, but there is no cost to attend the live training. Sign up now so that you know you have a seat and can order a dev board with plenty of time.

Golioth’s Zephyr Training in a Nutshell

Golioth is an instant IoT Cloud for microcontroller-level devices. We are hardware agnostic, and we use Zephyr, the fastest growing RTOS, because it supports a wide range of hardware from different vendors. We have a number of customers who ask where to find Zephyr training, so we developed our own boot camp to get you started.

Nordic nRF7002-DK board

Nordic’s new nRF7002 Development Kit

This three-hour training uses your choice of the Nordic nRF7002 DK (WiFi) or nRF9160 DK (Cellular). We begin by installing the Nordic tools on your local machine for loading new firmware on the boards. Everything else happens in a browser-based container. You’ll use VS Code and the Zephyr build environment, but it’s already set up for you to start working quickly.

Two sections are presented. We first load a pre-compiled binary on the board and test out the Golioth platform features. This ensures you are able to successfully program the board, and exposes you to the Zephyr networking stack, serial shell (used to assign credentials which are loaded into non-volatile storage), and logging system. The second portion of the training provides an overview of how the Zephyr development environment works before getting hands-on with Devicetree, Kconfig, pin mapping, timers, threads, and general RTOS knowledge.

You will come away with an understanding of how a Zephyr application is formatted, how the build system works, and what to expect when your application is running on your board.

Take a Peek, then Join Us Live!

Our training is no secret, the self-guiding documentation and the sample code are both available to peruse right now. However, you’ll find the interaction with other attendees and with the Golioth staff running the training fills in a lot of knowledge that’s not so easy to print on a webpage.

Sign up

Join us Live on July 12th! Note that we also changed our signup policy: if you meet the criteria, you will be automatically enrolled into training (see form for more details). We are limited to 60 trainees, but we plan to also hold a training in August. We hope to see you there!

Fill out the signup form at https://forms.gle/3yk5WrWJ3Dunds9CA

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Golioth is at the Embedded Open Source Summit Next Week!

The Golioth crew is headed to Prague next week for the Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS). More specifically, we have a booth, are presenting several talks, and are taking meetings during the 2023 Zephyr Developer Summit (ZDS) which is one of several co-located conferences participated in EOSS.

Interested in catching up with Golioth at the conference? Drop us a line and we’ll make sure it happens!

Three Fascinating Talks from Golioth

Golioth is not only a silver member of the Zephyr Project, we heavily use Zephyr as one of our device SDKs. We’re excited to share some of our experience on the RTOS in the three talks we’re presenting.

Zephyr & Visual Studio Code: How to Develop Zephyr Apps with a Modern, Visual IDE

Golioth Developer Founder and CEO Jonathan Beri will present this talk on using Visual Studio Code with Zephyr. By default, VS Code is not optimized for embedded development, and there are many tips and tricks that we’ve learned over the years to turn it into the most power Zephyr IDE out there. Learn More »

Zephyr Onboarding in 30 Seconds – Methods and Experiments During Zephyr Training

Golioth Developer Relations Lead Chris Gammell will present this talk on setting up embedded development environments for training sessions. While it focuses on Zephyr, the same toolchain and operating system headaches exist for all embedded engineers. Chris will detail the approach to get people up and compiling Zephyr in minutes, not hours, using remote virtual machines. Learn More »

Manifests: Project Sanity in the Ever-Changing Zephyr World

Golioth Developer Relations Engineer Mike Szczys will present this talk on using the Zephyr manifest system. This is particularly important for revision control of Zephyr applications. It enshrines the state of Zephyr and all its libraries and modules so that every build begins from a known-working set of build tools. Learn More »

Say Hello at the Golioth Booth

Chris Gammell walking us through the Golioth demo hardware at 2023 Embedded World

As sponsors of EOSS, we will be demoing hardware at the Golioth Booth (#41). Stop by to say hello and see how Golioth makes building microcontroller-level IoT fleets way easier than it’s ever been before. In addition to Jonathan, Chris, and Mike mentioned above, Golioth’s new Field Application Engineer, Marko Puric, will be on hand!

Don’t forget to leave us a note if you’d like to block out some time for a meeting!

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Golioth Hardware at Sensors Converge Conference

Golioth Sensors Converge

Our friends at DigiKey invited us to exhibit a hardware demo at the DigiKey booth during Sensors Converge 2023. The conference takes place in Santa Clara, California on June 20-22. Come see our demo at booth #616.

What kind of hardware makes the most sense at a DigiKey booth? All of the hardware, of course!

We’ve built a demo that shows off a fleet of three temperature sensors, all of them using microcontrollers from different manufactures, three different types of connectivity, and sensors from two different companies. Oh, did I mention that all of it runs the same C code? Readings are sent back to Golioth on a regular basis, and settings (like how often those readings occur) are configurable from the cloud. It’s shocking to think connectivity and cross-platform deployments could be this easy. But that’s what we do here at Golioth, and the Zephyr RTOS makes pretty easy.

Hardware and Firmware

Three member IoT fleet, all from different hardware vendors

The image above is what we pitched. It shows devices from Nordic, NXP, and Espressif connecting to Golioth using Cellular, Ethernet, and WiFi. They are all supported by Zephyr so adding them to the firmware project is a matter of generating one overlay file and one configuration file for each board.

You can take a look at the code in our iot_weather_fleet sample repository. All device-specific information is in the boards directory, everything else is abstracted to work with any Zephyr supported hardware (even swapping out sensors without changing the code).

Using different sensors to collect temperature readings.

Speaking of sensors, we used two different types: a Bosch BME280 and an Infineon DPS310. These both have driver support built into Zephyr. You just add your sensor to a Devicetree overlay file for the board, assign it an alias, and the RTOS does the rest. It’s truly remarkable!

Talk: Modular Hardware with Golioth and Zephyr

The concept for all of this came from a conference talk I gave earlier this year at the Embedded Online Conference. Most IoT devices are performing simple work, like sending back sensor readings. But of course the hardware design and firmware development take a lot of time and testing to get right. It should be possible to make hardware changes without rewriting the codebase when adding those changes to the firmware. And it is! We just need to embrace the concept and use it by default.

Design for the Embedded Future

The future is low power, and the future is most certainly connected. Golioth has those values at our core, making it simple to connect, control, and gather data from microcontroller-based devices en masse.

Golioth hardware being tested at DigiKey headquarters

With our Dev Tier you can connect up to 50 devices for free, so give Golioth a try today. We’d love to hear what you’re building–start a thread on the Golioth Forum to show off your work. If you have questions about how your fleet will perform with Golioth, please reach out to the Developer Relations Team and set up call.

We hope you’ll stop by the DigiKey booth this month. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll see!

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Golioth is at the Embedded Online Conference!

We love going to conferences. It’s great way to meet new people and learn about interesting new areas of the IoT industry. Unfortunately, IoT-interested engineers are spread far and wide around the world. Enter the Embedded Online Conference (EOC), which helps to connect engineers in the far flung reaches of the earth. Engineers benefit from downloading new knowledge from the comfort of their homes and companies like Golioth get to meet engineers working on novel problems in the IoT space.

We are giving 3 talks at the conference this year, let’s take a look at what those are about:

Mike Szczys – Building a Modular Codebase with Zephyr RTOS and Devicetree

Developer Relations Engineer Mike Szczys is talking about one of our favorite subjects: using Zephyr for more efficient code!

If there’s one thing the chip shortage has taught us, it’s to be ready to pivot to different hardware on a short timeline. Mike has found that the Zephyr Real-Time Operating System makes this much less painful for firmware engineers. It borrows many concepts from the Linux ecosystem, delivering Devicetree, Pin Control, and Kconfig to microcontroller-land.

This talk details how to use Zephyr to maintain one codebase that can be built for many different hardware combinations. Once Kconfig and Devicetree overlay files have been created for each target, compiling the same project for Nordic, Espressif, or NXP chips (to name just a few) is simple. Changing vendors or models of sensor and other peripherals is a similar experience. The C code grabs all necessary hardware information like what pins are connected and which peripheral bus should be used for a particular build. From there it’s just a matter of changing the board name in the build command.

Dylan Swartz – Leveraging DevOps for Streamlined Firmware Delivery

One of our newest teammates, and our first product manager, Dylan Swartz is showcasing how to deploy firmware to embedded devices over the internet using modern techniques.

This talk provides a comprehensive understanding of how DevOps principles are applied to IoT development for improved efficiency and reliability. He discusses integrating firmware builds and over-the-air (OTA) updates into a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, resulting in increased release frequency, dependability, and quality. The presentation draws from real-world IoT projects that have successfully implemented DevOps methodologies to expedite time-to-market and enhance overall performance.

Attendees will gain practical knowledge of best practices for troubleshooting, monitoring, and scaling IoT deployments, ensuring that devices remain secure and updated throughout their life cycle. This session delivers valuable insights into implementing DevOps for IoT, equipping attendees with the tools and techniques necessary to optimize their embedded system development processes.

Chris Gammell – Improve your Embedded IoT Hardware Today

This talk is about getting more out of your “Rev A” hardware: how do you maximize the information you can generate during the expensive prototyping process?

I (Chris here) show how to add in hooks and capabilities that make troubleshooting, upgrading, and measuring deficiencies much easier. Your second rev will be leaps and bounds ahead of your first, and you can get to market faster.

This talk showcases components, tools, and troubleshooting methods that enable better hardware, regardless of the parts you choose or the form factor you need to fit into. As an example, Chris shows some recently created hardware that focused on modularity and flexbility. It was not targeted at a production environment, but forms the basis for a good “rev a” build of hardware and help engineers to focus on validating new product ideas before digging into more complex layouts and smaller form factors.

Interested in attending?

We would love to see you at the EOC this year! All the Golioth talks can be viewed by registering for free. We also have a $100 off coupon for anyone interested in full access to all talks just use the code GOLIOTH2023 when you register for the conference. We will be doing a Q&A session, as are many of the other speakers at the conference. The conference starts April 24th, 2023, but is available for the rest of the year.

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Upcoming Webinar: How to collect data from IoT sensors using Golioth and Modus Toolbox™

Making sense of IoT sensor data with the Golioth ModusToolbox SDK

Please join us on Wednesday, April 19th 2023 for a webinar about using Golioth to collect IoT sensor data. The session will detail how to use the Infineon ModusToolbox™ to add Golioth device management.

This webinar will include Golioth team members alongside Clark Jarvis, a Senior Staff Technical Marketer at Infineon Technologies. He will present an overview of ModusToolbox™, the software support tool that helps combine and configure multiple repositories into a single embedded device firmware project. We’ll then demonstrate how to get a PSOC™ 6 connected via WiFi and streaming IoT sensor data back to Golioth.

What to Expect from this Webinar

As always, Golioth loves to present dynamic and interactive webinars. (No one will be reading Powerpoint slides in a monotone voice here!) The session will cover:

  • An overview on using ModusToolbox™
  • How to add software libraries with ModusToolbox™
  • How to use Golioth SDK functions to send time-series and stateful data to the cloud
  • How to view and interact with IoT data on the cloud-side
  • An overview on techniques for building scalable IoT Fleets

Sign up now!

This webinar is at 12 pm EDT / 9 am PDT on April 19th, 2023. If you can’t make it the day of, you can still still sign up to access the on-demand content. Those who attend will have an opportunity to ask questions towards the end of the presentation.

 

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Golioth Showcases Reference Designs at Embedded World 2023

Golioth returned to Embedded World in 2023 to showcase at the Zephyr booth. We brought a range of designs built with Zephyr and connected to the Golioth Cloud. Each of our Reference Designs show how Golioth technology can target verticals throughout the industry. We are regularly creating new designs and posting about them, both on this blog and on the Golioth Projects site.

Moving To Common Elements With Our 2023 Designs

We had a more standardized form factor and design elements with our 2023 designs than our demos at Embedded World 2022. Last year, we wanted to differentiate the functions and features of the Golioth Cloud when showcasing the “color demos”. Each of these demonstrated the different parts of our platform.

Golioth Embedded World 2022 Color Demos

This year was all about showcasing how similar many IoT designs can be. By extension, we wanted to show how we can swap some hardware and firmware to target entirely different market segments.

We built a new form factor that contains off-the-shelf hardware but still presents it in a somewhat compact manner. This took the form of the Aludel Mini case and PCB design, as well as our Ostentus front panel, both of which we have written about before. The result is a black box (har har) that allows us to target verticals. Our goals in the near future is to create additional firmware resources to make it easier for our users to replicate these designs using 100% off-the-shelf components.

Asset Tracker Port Side of Aludel Mini with Ostentus

Asset Tracker Connector Side of Aludel Mini with Ostentus

The 2022 designs had explanatory information / diagrams on the top PCB. This year we migrated to putting that information on a laser cut backing plate used as a mounting surface for the actual Reference Designs. These allowed visitors to read more on their own, if they desired, and kept our Reference Designs smaller and more like what might be deployed to the field. See images below for examples of backing plates.

Reference Design Demos

We brought 5 Reference Designs with us to Embedded World. In fact, we had more demos than we had space in the Zephyr booth to showcase them! Alas, we tried our best to highlight each element to the people walking by our booth.

DC Power monitor

This design was based off of our AC Power Monitor Reference Design that we have published about before. However, when thinking about logistics at a conference, we didn’t feel comfortable monitoring AC power in the booth. Instead, Mike took the design and swapped out the Click headers and reworked some of the firmware to instead monitor USB power flowing through the design. In the video above, you can see that we monitored the current of a fan and a USB lightbulb and then were able to dynamically chart the power usage on our bespoke Grafana dashboard.

Air Quality Monitor

Our Air Quality Monitor Reference Design was so new for Embedded World that we had only just published about it on our projects site. We will be doing a blog post and video about it soon. The main focus was capturing and displaying this information both on the Ostentus display (front panel) and then on the associated dashboard.

There are two interesting things that differentiate this design from the others. The first is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) that directly activates the fan onboard to start a cleaning cycle. This is a great example of how RPCs can be used for one-off activities triggered programmatically on an “as needed” basis.

The second is the use of LightDB State to visualize and trigger warnings from the device. Note the red dotted line in the chart on the CO2 concentration. This is a configurable level in LightDB State on a per-device basis. It could be used to trigger a local alarm (light, sound) or can be used to trigger other notification/alarm activities on the cloud.

Cold Storage Asset Tracker

Last year we brought an asset tracker in the form of the Orange Demo, based upon the Nordic Thingy91. This year we upgraded with a more accurate tracking GPS module that can run simultaneously with the cellular modem.

The unit tracks temperature for “cold storage” applications. This is a common use case for refrigerated trucks and shipping containers, as wells as tracking of vaccines in transit between medical facilities. Demonstrate GPS inside a conference hall is a challenge because of being locked to one position and under a bunch of metal girders, but we were able to showcase the underlying hardware and example paths that recalled historic trip data stored on Golioth.

IoT Trashcan Monitor

Our waste management solution is made to help municipalities and parks departments more efficiently route their diesel trash trucks. As in the rest of our demos, this becomes and exercise in scaling things down to fit on a tabletop in a conference facility. We achieved this by creating a portable (foldable) trashcan that we can setup on conference booth tables.

IoT Trashcan Monitor Demo on the right side

The miniature version of a trashcan helps to illustrate the usefulness of the Golioth Settings Service. The original demo had a trashcan that was roughly 1 meter tall and all of the “percentage-full” levels were based off of that height. Golioth makes it simple to select the individual device we brought to the show and adjust the height for a 300 mm tall trashcan. This “calibration” was instantly sent down to the device and it reported levels in exactly the same way it had for a taller trashcan.

Soil Moisture Monitor

The Soil Moisture Monitor Reference Design measures soil moisture levels and the amount of light reaching the unit. During this conference it barely saw any light, since we ran out of room on the desk! You can find full details in the soil moisture monitor demo video, and project page. We will have this and many new designs on display at the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague in late June. Please be sure to stop by there to see what we have been working on!

We’ll Train You To Build Your Own Zephyr Design

One of the things we were sure to point out in each of the example videos above is that we are running new training sessions showing people how to design with Zephyr. If you’d like to learn how to build your next design with the popular Open Source RTOS and Ecosystem, sign up at golioth.io/ew23.

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Meet with Golioth at Embedded World 2023

We had a great time last year at Embedded World 2022, showcasing the Golioth Color demos (red, green, blue, orange). This year we are returning to Embedded World on March 14th-16th 2023 and we’d love to discuss what you’re building and show you some of the things we’ll be working on. We’ll be at the Zephyr Booth once again (Hall 4, Booth #4-170), showcasing all of the demos of Golioth that we have built using our Golioth Zephyr SDK.

Reference Designs

This post will not be showcasing all of the things we have in the pipe for Embedded World, but it’s a safe bet that you will be able to check out our existing Reference Designs. We have been building vertical-specific solutions to make it easier to understand how Golioth helps companies build out their tech stack.

The IoT Trashcan Monitor shows how easy it can be to pull sensor data back to the cloud for processing and visualization. We not only register the level of the trash, but also record environmental data that would be of interest to a national park deploying these devices. This kind of data saves on trips out to the field to check the status of a trash can (Is it full? Was it tipped over? Did someone pour hazardous waste into it?. We visualize the status of the can using individual glyphs and can monitor across a fleet of devices using a “fleet view”.

The IoT Greenhouse Controller adds independent actions to the mix. The controller can automatically take action based on sensor thresholds you set using the Golioth Settings Service, or your user application (web or phone app, etc.) can use manual control turn on the ventilation or grow lights you install with your system. The applications are boundless, but we still think it’s important to showcase an end-to-end solution to highlight the quick time-to-market that Golioth enables.

We want to meet!

We want to hear from you and set up a time to discuss Golioth and how we might work together. Fill out the form below or email [email protected] to schedule a time to meet.

(once form is completed, you will need to scroll back up to see the confirmation message)

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Thousands of ESP32s: Device Management for ESP-IDF based devices

DevCon22 was a 2 day event that Espressif held last month to showcase upcoming products from Espressif as well as external partner offerings. Mike and I (Chris), gave a talk about how  the Espressif IoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF) makes it really easy to add Golioth to your IoT projects.

The ESP32 line of Wi-Fi based devices deliver the internet connection, while the Golioth ESP-IDF SDK provides access to things like:

Golioth covers your hardware

Golioth supports multiple hardware ecosystems, and we expect to enable even more in the future! We’ve built everything firmware engineers need to seamlessly connect their devices to the Golioth Cloud. Our goal is to meet engineers where they work, and this often means working directly inside the ecosystems their projects are built upon.

We were excited to support the ESP-IDF, which is based off the popular FreeRTOS core. This open source Real Time Operating System (RTOS) is prevalent throughout the electronics industry, with ports into many different chip ecosystems. The Espressif team has taken the core capabilities and ported it to work across their growing catalog of components. They have also bundled a range of meta tools that includes the build system (idf.py), the programmer (esptool.py), and more.

The Golioth ESP-IDF SDK leverages the necessary components to immediately access the Golioth Cloud on Espressif devices. We use CoAP as a transport layer, so we include a CoAP library to allow your device to “talk” CoAP. Golioth is secure by default, so we also include an mbedtls library, to allow your packets to be encrypted (using your PSK-ID and PSK). The net result is that firmware and hardware engineers don’t need to worry about the low level details of connecting to our servers, instead you can utilize high level APIs shown in the presentation video. For anyone using ESP32, Golioth just works!

The challenges of scale

The core of the talk is to showcase Cloud technologies that make it easier to scale your fleet. If you’re the classic example of a startup in a garage, you probably aren’t planning to scale out to millions of devices. Even if the future is uncertain, it’s good to understand the capabilities that will make it easier to control your fleet, from 10 devices to 10 million devices.

We also want to make sure that firmware and hardware engineers don’t need to become Cloud engineers to enable these capabilities. The features described above and in the video are available by default, without any additional Cloud-side code required. This means engineers can start sending data to the Cloud immediately and focus on the higher value tasks of pushing the data to those that need it, like their internal software or data science teams.

Mike shows many of these services in action during the talk, including showing how users can interact with the data that is sent to the Cloud using the ESP-IDF SDK. Each of these features enables users to grow their Cloud capabilities immediately:

Are you ready to scale?

Golioth is ready to take your fleet to the next level, using the ESP-IDF SDK or any of our other supported hardware ecosystems. You can immediately pull the SDK into your next project and start sending data to the Cloud. Reach out to us on our Forums or the Golioth Discord to discuss how we can help you to build out your fleet.

Slides

If you’d like to preview the slides used the video presentation, check them out below. If you’d like a PDF copy of the slides, please contact [email protected].

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Our largest in-person training yet

Golioth doesn’t just make servers to make it easier to implement secure OTA and send data back and forth to your IoT devices. We also offer open source SDKs that make it easy to build the devices in the first place.

We just got back from the Hackaday Superconference, a 3 day gathering of hardware- and software-minded enthusiasts from a wide variety of industries. We presented a 2 hour in-person training, using many of the things we have learned from our past all-remote training. This article will expand on the training and how things change when there are other people sitting in a room together.

A recap of training

For those that haven’t read the past articles about our training, let’s give a quick recap. We use the $35-ish Adafruit MagTag as our main board for this training. We like it because it has:

  • An Espressif ESP32-S2 for running Wi-Fi
  • Inputs:
    • Accelerometer
    • Light Sensor
    • 4 user buttons
    • Stemma / Qwiic header
  • Outputs:
    • 4 NeoPixel side launch LEDs (multicolor programmables)
    • Speaker
    • eInk Display

As we onboard people to this training, we try to slowly ramp people up as they are learning about the hardware and Zephyr, a real time operating system (RTOS) that we use as the basis of firmware we will put onto the board.

The first thing that trainees do is compile and install a pre-written program that connects to a Wi-Fi access point, connects the embedded hardware to the Golioth cloud, and interacts with the cloud sending data and log messages. Once the trainee has successfully connected to the network, we step back and show them how to compile and interact with the cloud and RTOS in a more targeted way, by giving them exercises that showcase different aspects of Zephyr.

This training had an additional “mode” because it was an in-person conference: Mike wrote an additional example that allows the users to pull their name off of LightDB State (our stateful database service) and update the ePaper screen. Once it pulls your name, the badge will preserve that data after a reset.

Programming without toolchain install

A key tenet we have for training is to get the user compiling as fast as possible. Asking people to pre-install software or install when they get to the training is a recipe for frustration. Instead, we use our Kasm setup that we have mentioned a couple of times on the blog. When the trainee sat down at the training, the only thing they needed to do was click on a link and they are launched into a virtual environment contained within the browser. In addition to the desktop environment, we have installed and configured all of the necessary files to immediately start compiling firmware.

We know that people come to training with a wide variety of computer hardware, which normally means we get a variety of eras of Windows, Mac, and Linux machines compiling the programs that will go onto the embedded hardware. One trainee had a laptop issue the night before and was our first trainee to complete the training using a Valve Steamdeck (a handheld Linux computer meant for gaming).

This training got big

We had 28 people sitting down and going through the training. This was our largest number of trainees to date. The Kasm servers are able to scale up to however many people we have taking the training, so that was no problem. Some things we noticed with a group this large.

  • The layout of the tables in the space we were in was one long “banquet” style table. This meant it was harder to sit next to each user and guide them when necessary. They did benefit from camaraderie with their fellow trainees.
  • We really enjoyed being able to peek over someone’s shoulder and see what they were having trouble with. We use gather.town when we do remote training, which is a good video platform, but it’s still a limited window into the other person’s struggles.
  • Having 28 people in a room strains the Wi-Fi a bit. We were in a facility with very good Wi-Fi overall, but there were additional people all over the space (outside the training area) that were also using Wi-Fi, so the system was a little strained. Remote training means everyone gets all of their home or office Wi-Fi bandwidth to work.

We may have found the practical upper limit of people taking the training without additional preparation like private Wi-Fi networks at a conference. We will continue to refine the experience so it’s a smooth onboarding to using Zephyr or other platforms we train with in the future.

Future training

Speaking of other platforms, Golioth supports more than just Zephyr! We have an ESP-IDF SDK, which makes it easy to use the FreeRTOS based implementation from Espressif. We can use the same hardware that we know and love, because it’s supported by both ecosystems. We also recently announced support for ModusToolbox™, which means we can help engineers connect their PSoC™ 6 based projects to the Golioth Cloud.

If you’re interested in taking part as an individual or as a company, sign up for future training here.

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