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Free Zephyr Training Hosted By Golioth, June 7th 2023

Golioth continues to run training for hardware and firmware developers looking to learn more about Zephyr and connecting their devices to the cloud; our last public training had 30 engineers trying out Zephyr and Golioth on accessible IoT hardware.

Our next training will take place on June 7th, 2023 at noon EST / 9 am PST / 6 pm CEST. There are limited slots to take part in this training and we will give priority to a select group described below.

What’s new in our training

We will continue to run training using Kasm, a virtual environment for building Golioth and Zephyr projects. Using Kasm in conjunction with Gather.town was a successful combination for our past virtual trainings. We want to ensure we can easily answer questions from different groups and accommodate as many individuals as possible.

One big change for this training is we are switching to Nordic Semiconductor hardware for the training. We previously chose to use the Adafruit Magtag, which features the Espressif ESP32-S2 onboard. However, we are excited to try out new partner hardware. It will also be interesting to have an included debugger on this hardware, which we hope to target in future versions of the training. Users who decide to continue following Golioth examples will be well prepared by using the boards listed below:

  • nRF9160-DK
    • This is the primary board that we recommend for this upcoming training. It is also one of our Continuously Verified Boards, which means you will be able to use this board to try out any feature of the Golioth platform. Golioth works great on cellular devices, and is well supported on the nRF9160. Being cellular, it means you could take part in the training from just about anywhere.
  • nRF7002-DK
    • We had written about our excitement for this platform, but with sourcing issues occurring right now, it doesn’t line up well with this upcoming training. We think this will be our main board going forward. The cost for this board is much less than the nRF9160-DK and it doesn’t require a cellular SIM in order to operate, just a Wi-Fi connection.

The key thing for this training is you can use either of these platforms and achieve the same output. We may add additional hardware in the future to become even more resilient against sourcing issues.

Want a guaranteed slot?

Golioth offers free training, but we love learning more about users and customers up front. We are offering preferential placement for users who have a business use case and are willing to talk through it with Golioth team members. Fill out the form below and indicate you’d like to be considered for this option. This isn’t a requirement, just a way to get a guaranteed spot on training.

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Using the Nordic nRF7002-DK for Zephyr Training

Golioth hosts a lot of training on Zephyr RTOS. It’s the fastest growing RTOS and Zephyr is great for Golioth because it delivers a ton of cross-platform support, includes a built in networking stack, and it’s an open source project guided by the Linux Foundation. The only problem we’ve had is finding target hardware to use during training. Until now! The nRF7002 Development Kit from Nordic is what we are targeting for upcoming training. Let’s look at why that is.

Golioth’s hardware needs for Zephyr Training

Nordic nRF7002-DK board

Nordic’s new nRF7002 Development Kit

We have a few base requirements when choosing hardware for training:

  • In-Tree Zephyr support
  • WiFi – although we support Cellular, WiFi, Ethernet, and Thread, we find WiFi is ubiquitous and usually the most straight-forward to get connected during training.
  • USB-based firmware update – we don’t want to require a separate programmer
  • User Interface – there should be some way for the user to interact with the hardware
  • Integrated sensor – Golioth makes it easy to stream sensor data to the cloud, it’s nice to show this happening live during training
  • All-in-one – we don’t want the added complexity of the user having to wire up modules.
  • Inexpensive – there’s a chance people will never use this device again after the training. So it should be inexpensive, and generate as little waste as possible.
  • Available – see also: chip shortage

Released earlier this year, the Nordic nRF7002-DK ticks almost all of these boxes. It includes the nRF7002 which is a WiFi connectivity IC, along with the nRF5340 that runs the applications. It uses the Segger on-board programmer via the USB port. It includes two user buttons and two LEDs for user interaction. There is no integrated sensor but we’re working around that.

It is inexpensive at an MSRP of $59, however production is still ramping up since the product launch. As a result, there are some stock shortages right now which we hope will improve soon. This board is a great way to try out Golioth, Nordic, and Zephyr all at the same time. All around, we think it’s likely that anyone learning to use Zephyr will find this board useful far beyond the Golioth session, helping to reduce the chance of training hardware becoming e-waste.

An early glimpse at the code

If you happen to already have an nRF7002-DK on your bench, you can give our training repository an early look. We’d love to have your feedback!

nRF7002dk simulating temperature sensor readings

Temperature values streaming to Golioth

At the time of writing, only one module has been published. It’s a “kitchen sink” demo that shows off all of the Golioth services.

I mentioned we are working around the lack of a built-in sensor, this is done with an algorithm that simulates temperature sensor data. That’s being recorded on the cloud using the LightDB Stream service which adds timestamps to each data set received.

The user-interface includes a blinking LED for output. Pressing the buttons on the board selects which of the two LEDs is currently blinking, and reports that LED number to the Golioth LightDB State service. The blinking speed can be updated remotely using our Settings service. And of course our Remote Logging service is enable on this demo so you can access the logging output as the application runs.

If you want to try this out, just follow the README and keep a few things in mind:

  1. Use `west init` to set up your workspace, and do not directly clone. That way, when you call `west update` it will pull in all dependencies (including the nRF Connect SDK and Golioth Zephyr SDK)
  2. These boards will require WiFi credentials to connect to your network, and device credentials to connect to Golioth. Both are entered via serial terminal after flashing firmware, and will be persistent (in the Zephyr settings partition) over power cycle and future firmware upgrades

Wait, what about the Zephyr training?

This post is a sneak peek. We are still actively developing this new training module and will add more subdirectories to this repository over time. I recommend starring the repo so you are notified.

The most immediate plans are to implement modules that show how to blink an LED using timers and threads, and how to react to button input. We’ll show how to define your own LEDs and buttons using Devicetree overlays and how to add sensors and enable the in-tree drivers. Of course we’d love your feedback on what else to include, please let us know!

You’re invited to Golioth’s free Zephyr training

Get up to speed with Zephyr and Golioth, sign up for our free training which is held virtually. You’ll be the first notified when our next session is scheduled.

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How to optimize power in Celluar IoT deployments (with Jared Wolff)

How do you ensure you achieve the lowest possible power with your Cellular IoT Devices? We held a webinar on January 18th, 2023 where we tackled this question, alongside our friend Jared Wolff of CircuitDojo. In this video, we review how to measure and optimize your hardware, firmware, and software. The main focus of this video is the nRF9160 from Nordic Semiconductor, which runs NCS / Zephyr. Jared shared many of the tips and tricks he has learned while building the CircuitDojo Feather nRF9160.

A three pronged approach

There are three key areas to focus on when trying to optimize your design for low power.

  • Hardware – Jared talked about the importance of part choice, especially on the switching regulator. The nRF9160 has a low quiescient current if everything is configured properly.
  • Firmware – In order to take advantage of the low current draw of the part in question, we need to understand and enable features within the nRF9160. This would be true of any part we chose to use, the configuration is crucial. Understanding how the cellular modem is communicating with the tower is another important step, since each time you ping the tower it takes energy to check in.
  • Software – In this case, we mean Cloud software, such as the capabilities that Golioth provides to its users. The Golioth platform enables efficiencies like CoAP communication and CBOR encoding, lowering the size (and power draw) of each packet you decide to send to the Cloud. Things like the Golioth Setting service allows you to enable and disable different modes on your device to achieve fine-grained control of devices in your fleet.

Take your design (and battery life) further

Golioth is focused on building better cellular IoT deployments. We enable engineers to build customizable and reliable device fleets that monitor and impact the world around them. If you need any help optimizing your fleet, let us know on our forum or drop us a note.

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The 12 Layers of IoT

When I started at Golioth, I wanted to understand the service offerings from different companies in the space. What resulted, was a chart (below), slideshow (below), and a presentation I have now given a couple different times (video, above). All of these things showcase how I started to investigate and understand the inter-operating pieces of any modern Internet of Things (IoT) system.

Only 12 Layers?

Let’s start with the obvious: I could have chosen just about any number of layers to explain IoT systems.

I chose to highlight the pieces of IoT systems as someone working on building Reference Designs, which have a Device component and a Cloud component. I framed many of these capabilities from the perspective of my time at Golioth and the aspects of the system that I found to be crucial to a deployment. I wanted to understand the competitive landscape as a starting point (finding other companies providing IoT platforms) and expanded from there.

I stopped at 12, because that is roughly the amount I thought I could describe without audience members falling asleep. 12 layers also captures a good amount of functionality. However, it misses many other pieces of IoT implementation and very easily could have been the 100 layers of IoT.

The Chart

The true beginning of this talk was a diagram I created. It shows how I understood offerings from different IoT providers, with varying levels of “vertical integration” (how much of the solution they provide to their users). Some providers go all the way from the hardware up to the Cloud. Some provide key infrastructure pieces (like Golioth) and point you at external providers in order to give you more flexibility. Some are hyper specialized in one area.

The key idea was to point out that these providers exist and that there are different reasons to choose one over another. That is to say: each has a valid business proposition and fits a customer profile. One provider might serve an operations group that is looking to add connectivity to an existing business and simply spit data out onto the internet—many businesses want that. Other times, a technology group inside a larger product development company might be looking to supplement their product design capabilities and not do everything in-house. It’s important to understand the landscape as a design engineer evaluating what they should buy and what they should DIY. Each layer in the presentation has the pro’s and con’s of “Buy vs DIY”.

Beyond IoT Platform Providers

Unstated and unshown on the chart is the “DIY” of IoT subsystems. As mentioned in the video and slides, it’s possible that companies want to develop everything from the ground up and maintain all of their own IP. The downside is the high cost in terms of people and time, and often the “full DIY” method of developing is relegated to the largest companies looking to develop an IoT product.

Others are utilizing building blocks from hyper-scalers like AWS and Azure. Sometimes this takes the form of using hyper scaler IoT platforms (AWS IoT, Azure IoT), and other times, they use even more basic computing elements in the cloud (EC2s, S3 buckets, Lambdas). In all these cases, there is a significant amount of “Cloud Software” that is written and maintained by the company looking to develop an IoT product.

How do the 12 Layers of IoT impact you?

These resources exist to help engineers and business people new to the IoT industry to understand how to create successful IoT deployments. Most importantly, this talk sought to remedy the problem of “you don’t know what you don’t know” (reference). If you don’t know about potential pitfalls in deploying an IoT solution and what you might need 2 or 3 years down the line, you won’t be able to take steps up front to prevent those problems.

A tangible example is in “layer 10”, which is listed as “deployment flexibility”. If you want to hire an IoT platform to get your deployment off the ground, but later will want to run your own cloud infrastructure, you need to choose different options when creating your system. Platforms like Golioth allow you to run your own cloud infrastructure as part of our Enterprise plan. Companies that don’t choose this path at the beginning of their deployment find themselves re-architecting their entire solution (all the way down to the hardware) at a later time in order to implement a bespoke cloud solution that fits their needs.

The Presentation

Below is a refined version of the talk that I gave at All Things Open in Raleigh NC in November 2022. Unfortunately that version of the talk wasn’t recorded, but the slides below are the most up-to-date version I have.

Did I miss a layer?

I am continually refining my concept of what comprises IoT deployments and the required pieces. It’s possible I missed out on something important. Maybe there are critical pieces of infrastructure that you think I glossed over. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our forum or on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook).

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Golioth Developer Training: Open to the public on Dec 14th

A key mission at Golioth is to make it easier for hardware and firmware developers to connect devices to the internet. We do that in two ways:

  1. Providing easy-to-use APIs and SDKs for IoT devices to connect to Golioth Cloud endpoints.
  2. Training developers how to use the Device side code.
Sign Up For Dec 14th Training

We have done many successful training sessions so far, showing individuals and companies how to connect their first devices. Along the way, we have learned that there is a large unfulfilled need in the market for training in the IoT space. So we’re doing it again! We’ll show people how to connect devices and get access to things like:

  • Secure Over-The-Air Updates to constrained devices
  • Command and Control over remote devices
  • Learn how to create and modify settings for remote devices
  • Understand how to implement data tracking from your device

We will be running our first training open to the public on December 14th, 2022. Read more below if you’d like to take part.

Training challenges

Once again we’ll be training developers from afar. We did this back in October for a select group of hardware engineers looking to learn more about Zephyr:

Click to learn more about our experience back in October of 2022

The upcoming training will be built upon the lessons we learned during that training, and our last in-person training at the Hackaday Superconference. In both cases, we used Kasm to provide fully remote development environments so that users don’t need to install anything on their local machine (there are directions on how to do that after the training is over). We think this is an important piece to ensure people can get started quickly.

How to use Zephyr

We currently offer 3 SDKs as part of our device support, including an ESP-IDF SDK, a Modus Toolbox SDK, and a Zephyr SDK (including the Nordic Connect SDK variant). These SDKs cover a wide range of embedded hardware from different vendors.

The training includes some segments that detail how to use Zephyr, a Real Time Operating System (RTOS) that covers a wide range of different hardware platforms. We use it on many of our internal hardware reference designs at Golioth, and it was the first platform we launched. Hardware and firmware engineers who are new to Real Time Operating Systems will continue their learning journey by understanding how the RTOS connects to sensors and low level GPIO and how to manipulate different elements of the subsystems. Once a trainee understands how to get the data off of an external component (like a sensor), the Golioth Zephyr SDK makes it a simple task to forward that data along to the Golioth Cloud.

Requirements and background

We have referred to “Hardware and Firmware Engineers” in this article, because we expect that intermediate to expert level engineers will get the most out of this training. If you are brand new to understanding C or if you have never tried programming embedded hardware before, this might be a frustrating experience. If you would like some pointers to starter content that might prepare you for the training, please ask on our Forum and we will try to get you a customized list of resources that will help prepare you for future versions of this training.

Logistics

  • We are not charging for this training
  • We will be capping the training at 30 people
  • All attendees will be on a first-come, first-served basis
  • Those who are accepted for this training will receive an email with more details
  • You will be expected to purchase your own hardware
    • Details will be sent with your acceptance to this training
    • Be sure you leave enough time for shipping from your local distributor
  • Signing up to take part and not attending will disqualify you from future training

Sign up here


If you have clicked “submit” and don’t see any changes, please scroll back up to the top

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The Road to Firmware as a Hardware Engineer

How the Golioth Developer Training paved the way

This is a guest post from Shrouk El-Attar, discussing her journey from the hardware space into the firmware space and how Golioth training has helped her understand building out IoT systems using Zephyr.

The Journey Started with Hardware

To me, hardware just makes sense! You have specific requirements, find a part that can fulfill them, read its datasheet, and then execute. Voila! Successful design achieved.

The worst thing about the process? I don’t know…maybe the Googling? Getting a calculation out by a factor of ten? The tedious BOM stock checking process? These things can be long and tiring, but still, the concepts make sense. Designing a PCB is easy to understand; you follow simple rules and let the copper tracks do the rest. Even things in the “RF Voodoo” territory make sense with well-developed RF design tools these days.

Not too long ago, I finally took the leap into the world of consulting as a self-proclaimed “Hardware Queen”. With that, I saw the terrifying rise in demand for the 2-in-1 engineering consultants: a hardware engineer who is also a firmware engineer.

The Firmware Roadblock

Firmware feels to me like hardware’s anarchist sister. I know her a little; we have some history. It might surprise you to know that she hasn’t always been this way with me.

Once upon a time, there was Arduino (I know, I know). I probably picked up my first Arduino in 2012. I’d heard about them long before then, but as an asylum seeker, I couldn’t afford to own one. That is until the UK officially recognised me as a refugee, and I could finally access higher education and buy my own shiny Arduino.

The first time I got to Blinky on my Arduino, it was like something clicked. I understood it. I understood every single bit of code I was writing on it. “I have a gift,” I thought. Perhaps learning Visual Basic (yup) back in 2007 laid down those basics for me to get to Blinky on Arduino and be a total boss at it.

From then on, I felt invincible. Whatever I could think of, I was able to make it. Self-watering plant? Check. NFC easter egg hunt? Check. Twitter-powered bubble machine? Check. Arduino felt like hardware and software meeting in perfect harmony in a world where anything I could think of was possible.

Shrouk’s Arduino Connected Plant: Light data is sent to cloud platform (left), phone notifications are sent when light data is critical (middle), plant “tweets” when light data reaches below a certain level (right).

My initial success was a sign I was going to be a firmware engineer. But soon after, my firmware dreams were shattered.

Stuck in the Firmware Valley

My first full-time engineering role was at Intel back in 2015, where I specialized in the then-brand-new field called IoT. “Can you imagine that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices?” I thought to myself. I was so excited that I would be one of the people developing those devices. It was the future.

One of the first things I couldn’t wait to get my hands on was the all-shiny Intel Realsense 3D Camera. But when I downloaded my SDK, I didn’t know where to start. After days of struggling on my own, I could get some things working with the help of my senior colleagues. But none of it clicked. I had no idea what I was doing. I was not gifted. Frankly, I sucked at firmware.

I started specializing in hardware. As the years passed, some of my all-time favorite chips became the nRF5 MCUs by Nordic Semiconductor. What a hardware engineer’s dream. Can’t get to a specific pin during routing? Don’t worry; choose literally any other pin you can reach more easily, and re-route there! The nRF5 had an excellent reputation amongst my firmware colleagues too.

In 2019, I decided to give firmware another go on my favorite chip. I wasn’t too far down the toolchain setup, and I’d already started regretting it. What the heck were Make files?! It was an excruciating process. But–no exaggeration–one week later, I’d managed to set up the toolchain. Great, let’s get to Blinky! Save, build, flash. Error.

I spent hours, then finally figure out the error. Save, build, flash—another error. Repeat a zillion times. It turns out I had never set up the toolchain correctly in the first place. Months later, I finally found a training that would work, or so I thought. This turned out to be my biggest disappointment. Nothing in the training was up to date. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. This was indeed the final time I’d try to touch firmware again. I was stuck. I was done.

The Golioth Way

Back in present day, as I was realizing the demand for the 2-in-1 hardware and firmware engineering consultant, a well timed post from Chris Gammell appeared on my feed. The post was about the Golioth Developer Training, targeted explicitly at hardware engineers. The 2-in-1 engineer could be me. Was I going to try firmware again? Absolutely.

The training took place entirely remotely with hardware engineers from all over the world. This is going to be it, for sure! But, from the very beginning, I was already struggling. “Here we go again”, I thought. I shouldn’t have thought I could do it. I struggled with minor details at first, like appending -d instead of -D to a build command, which apparently gives wildly different results. I copied and pasted the correct information but in the wrong fields. And each exercise took me way longer than the “estimated time” suggested for each section.

The training happened in a large group, but we did the exercises independently. Chris and Mike were checking in on each of us throughout, so they were able to help me fix anything I missed very quickly on a one-to-one basis. As the training went on, I started to notice that I needed their help less and less. What is this I feel? Some cautious optimism, perhaps?

The training method was active. I wasn’t sitting at my desk blindly following instructions. No, I was pushed to figure out the correct way to solve a problem at every stage. It was presented in bite-size information with many collapsed sections. The training also included links referencing concepts, e.g. Zephyr Pin Control, throughout, should I want to learn more. For the most part, I didn’t click those because I wanted to stay on track. My head was already full of too much firmware to learn. But I enjoyed that they were there so I could refer back to them in the future.

Then the happiest of accidents happened. I picked up a later stage of the training on my own, then realized that I had to redo the earlier parts to get to where I wanted to pick up from. Not going to lie; I was slightly annoyed. But while re-doing them, I saw that it wasn’t taking me very long at all. This time, I was well within the time estimates suggested for each exercise, if not much quicker. Was this working for me? Did I finally find a method to learn commercially viable firmware that works?

A light bulb went off when I realized that it took me over a week to get to Blinky on my previous firmware training, but within a couple of hours, I was already speaking to my Wi-Fi device through the Golioth Console. Not only that, but it was all through the Zephyr RTOS with Golioth. The same Zephyr RTOS I struggled endlessly with on the nRF5 hardware that I love. It was a miracle to think about being enabled for firmware on my favorite hardware platform. Coupled with the fact that Golioth is entirely scalable, i.e. the idea that I can start from an idea to production on the same platform, made Golioth a dream.

Golioth also helped me develop a community, some of whom I became close Discord friends with. We all need a Discord buddy to complain to about daily life as an electronics engineering consultant (Hi Seth!). And a decade after I picked up my first Arduino, Golioth Developer Training helped me finally break through that commercially viable firmware ceiling.

Next, I’ll work on reference designs and put the skills I learnt from the training to the test. Watch this space.

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

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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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Fully Remote Hardware Training: A Recap of Golioth’s Experience

Understanding hardware and firmware is the first step towards building any kind of “thing” that will be part of an “Internet of Things” (IoT) deployment. For new chips and firmware ecosystems, this often means going through training.

Golioth Developer Relations (the group I’m part of) is tasked with making sure our users understand how to get their hardware connected to the Golioth Cloud. We have been doing in-person (as safety protocols allow) and remote training for Golioth users.

Last week, we did our first training for the broader public, a group of hardware engineers interested in learning more about Zephyr and Golioth. I wanted to discuss some of the tools and methods we used to do a fully remote hardware training. If you’re interested in taking part in the training in the future, please let us know in the associated forum post or by email. There are more details on the available options at the end of this post.

How we do fully remote hardware training

The main challenge with virtual gatherings is that trainees are not sitting in the same room as the trainers. This is an easy problem to understand, but a harder one to solve.

Hardware

The first step was standardization on the hardware. To achieve that goal, we created a list of the bare minimum of parts and shipped them out to all attendees, even those who already had some of the hardware. We wanted to make sure that we had exactly the same hardware in hand. Our trainees were in the US and Europe, so we ordered through DigiKey, with DHL shipping at least a week in advance. The average cost was about $60 of materials in the US, and $85 to Europe, both numbers including shipping, VAT, tarriffs, etc.

For the hardware itself, we use the Adafruit MagTag. It contains the Espressif ESP32-S2 as the main processor on board. This time around we focused on Zephyr for this training, but the board also works great with the Golioth ESP-IDF SDK. Remember, Golioth has 3 SDKs currently (vanilla Zephyr, NCS, ESP-IDF), and we are always working to enable other hardware platforms.

Adafruit MagTag

Video meeting

You might think that after 3 years of a global pandemic, the world would have figured out video software. But the key difference between a simple video call and our remote training is that it’s not just 10 people sitting in a single video session. We want to be able to dynamically “move” between different conversations, especially as trainers.

To achieve this, we used Gather.town. It utilizes tiny avatars you can move around the screen with your keyboard like a video game. As your avatar gets closer to another avatar, your video and audio pops up to those in range. The rugs in the image below also allow “private” areas which work kind of like mini conference rooms. We found this allowed us to dynamically help smaller groups of people while also making announcements to the entire group. Trainees could also choose to work together on different components of the training material.

Our Gather.town Training Location for Hardware Developers

Tooling

The biggest challenge with any training is dealing with firmware tooling, specifically with Zephyr. We have been working on solving this issue for a while. The Zephyr installation continues to get simpler overall, thanks to the Zephyr dev team updating what gets installed for each user. But we still have trainees “walking through the door” (figurative in this case) with a wide range of computers where the tools will be installed. A range of different operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux–with different distributions) means that there is no one standardized setup. What’s more, if someone has tried out Zephyr in the past, it’s possible there are interactions between the old installation and the new one, not to mention a variety of dependencies within each machine. If we could, we would ask everyone to show up with a brand new installation of Windows or Linux on a laptop…but that’s unlikely to happen.

We wrote in the past about using Kasm and Docker to have a standardized install. Last week’s training represents the first time we used it with real users. In short, it worked! We collaborated with the wonderful team at KasmWeb (makers of the Kasm tool) who gave us seats of their Cloud offering to use with our trainees.

Zero install embedded training with Zephyr using Kasm and Docker

The first step was created a dockerfile and a Docker image that contained everything required for the training. This way we were able to spin up a standardized, browser based UI environment for everyone taking the training. The entire Zephyr toolchain and Espressif support tools were pre-installed in that image, in addition to VScode, a terminal, a browser, and text editing tools.

Trainees open a browser window that looks like Ubuntu (it is, under the hood), and immediately start compiling Zephyr code. At past in-person training sessions, we had issues with bandwidth just downloading the tool packages. While we still needed bandwidth to communicate with the browser-based UI, all of the processing and storage is done on the cloud. Our plan is to use Kasm at our next in-person training.

We continue to evolve our strategy for making training a more seamless process and offering a range of different training to our customers.

Kasm instance of a Docker container with Zephyr / Espressif / Golioth tools installed

Training material

The final piece of the puzzle is the training material itself. Again, this is an evolving solution, because we continue to add more material, and because we track changes to the Zephyr SDK over time.

On Training.Golioth.io, we take people through getting signed up for Golioth, creating a first binary for the MagTag using their Golioth credentials, and then launch them into understanding different parts of Zephyr. We take developers all the way through working with the DeviceTree and understanding how to interact with an in-tree sensor in Zephyr. Our goal is to help hardware and firmware engineers understand how to use some of the most critical parts of an RTOS, and then use those features to communicate back to the Cloud, thereby making their device an “IoT” based device.

training.golioth.io

If you’re interested in trying the training without Golioth present, you can do the “asynchronous” version of our training. Training.Golioth.io is free to the public. You won’t have access to our Kasm server, but you will be able to install the Zephyr toolchain using supplemental directions. Please utilize the Golioth Forums for any questions you have about training.

Results

We scheduled a 2 hour training session, as we know that engineers’ time is valuable. In that time, 100% of the trainees were able to get their devices connected to the internet, pass data back and forth between Device and Cloud, and explore the features of Zephyr. As in any training, each person worked at a different pace and was able to get to different checkpoints. Each trainee could use their hardware and training site at home for later study.

An unfortunate side effect of having multiple tools, including training materials, browser based UI, and video software is a lot of tab/window switching to keep track of it all. In-person training will cut down on the video window, but it would be nice to further integrate the training to include all required materials in one place. We had a “browser within a browser” (Firefox installed within the Kasm container), but that consumed a lot of virtual memory and wasn’t an optimal solution.

The other major restriction is that the binaries our trainees compiled were not directly loaded onto the MagTag hardware. Because we worked inside a virtual (browser based) container, there was no direct connection to the hardware. We also talked about this in the past article about Kasm based development. Because virtualization tools are created to be independent from the hardware, it is difficult to then reverse course and say, “We want this container to talk to USB!”.

We are working with the Kasm team and looking at different ways to program binaries directly from inside the container, and would love to hear about other options people have seen. We solved this during the training by having trainees install the Espressif esptooldirectly on their machines. This still involved some amount of install, but it was limited to a small program. When a trainee completed a build, they could download the binary image from the container to their local machine and load it onto the MagTag using esptool. After that, the MagTag was able to talk back to Golioth.

Future training

We are excited to continue iterating on this training in the future and would love to hear from people that are interested in participating. Here are the options you can try:

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Zero-install embedded training with Zephyr using Kasm and Docker

TL;DR: we’ve enabled people to compile Zephyr programs from a computer with no toolchain installed, almost instantly.

Part of our charter at Golioth is to help people prototype and scale IoT devices faster. That’s why we offer an open source SDK built on top of Zephyr. We think this represents a “fast forward” or “cheat code” for quickly standing up an IoT device prototype. On the cloud side, our servers represent hundreds of hours of customization and testing; you can instantly connect and get access to resources that allow hardware and firmware developers to scale to thousands or millions of devices. But sometimes it can be scary to get started in a new ecosystem or Real Time Operating System (RTOS) like Zephyr, even if it will speed things up later. As such, we do public and private training for companies and individuals.

As part of the resources we offer, we maintain a Training site that walks people through how to get started using Zephyr, normally targeting remote training. You can follow along right now; you’ll need to purchase an Adafruit MagTag board and sign up for a free Dev Tier account, but everything else is covered on the training site. At the end of the training, you should understand how to interact with hardware in Zephyr and send data to and from the Golioth cloud over WiFi. It’s a short jump from there to re-target other hardware, including your custom designs.

The tripping points for the training often revolve around the installation process. This is multi-pronged:

  • The size of a Zephyr install is relatively large, even when you are only targeting a specific platform. Having multiple people in a room, even with good WiFi or network connectivity, means that the shared bandwidth will be a limiting factor. More trainees means slower downloads.
  • Everyone comes to training with a computer in a different state. They might have tried to install Zephyr tools in the past, or they might have a particularly rare Linux distro, or many other possible variations. It would be best if everyone showed up with a fresh OS install…but that is very unrealistic.
  • There are different expectations around how installations should go. Many embedded engineers are “Windows first” and expect a complete IDE for any new platform. Some silicon vendors help to support this in Zephyr, such as Nordic Semiconductor. But Zephyr was originally targeting Linux-based machines, and we have found the smoothest flow for installing tools for all of the platforms that Zephyr can target means you are Linux-first.

In this article, we’re going to talk about our attempt to normalize setups and have pre-installed tools using Kasm and Docker. These are not the only tools in this space; we have previously written about GitPod and are investigating GitHub Codespaces, but this is a look at one of the latest experiments we’re running at Golioth.

Kasm thin client

The concept of a browser based client or a “thin client” is nothing new. They were all the rage back in the day of time share servers (really those were “dumb terminals”) and then again in the 90s as computing was more ubiquitous throughout the office (with a centralized set of servers). The difference is that now things are much more graphical and running completely inside the browser.

Kasm was started in 2017 and includes an open source project run by Kasm Technologies. The company behind Kasm has a per seat licensing model or they will run the servers directly for you (once you’re past 5 trial seats). They specialize in visualizations around containers. Once you log into a Kasm server, you are able to launch a range of containers, normally a desktop view or a single app that will load up in your browser. You can try this for yourself on the Kasm demo page.

The server that we’re running on is a pre-configured image that I pulled from the Digital Ocean marketplace. I was able to install all of the required software on a provisioned server running in some unknown datacenter. All I did was log in the first time to get my credentials for a user and an admin, and the rest of my interaction was on the web interface that the Kasm server presents to me as an admin.

Docker

As a hardware engineer, Docker is one of those things I heard about for a long time and never really “got it”. I’m still not sure I do. But following the tutorial for customizing a Kasm container, I started to understand a bit more. In that set of tutorials I started from a base Operating System image (Ubuntu Focal) that allowed visualization through the browser. Then I was able to start customizing, adding things like custom files on the desktop, custom icons to launch programs I installed, or adding background images pulled in from the web. It was in this customization section that I could add all of the commands from the Golioth Docs for installing Zephyr tools.

My layman explanation of Docker would be “Creating a virtual computer where I can automatically install a bunch of software using shell scripts. Once I have built that virtual computer, I am able to use it over and over again, including different instances of that virtual computer (for this Kasm scenario)”. The analogy would be if I bought a bunch of laptops, had an install CD (remember those?) with all of the required software on them, and then I mailed the freshly installed laptop to everyone who is taking our training. Sound crazy? That’s one of the best solutions we have seen, where a trainer will bring a pelican case with 24 laptops freshly imaged to on-site training. Their training works flawlessly every time!

I don’t have much else to mention about Docker aside from the idea that it’s possible to script a bunch of install commands that match the install instructions we have on our Zephyr getting started guide. In fact, I used those very directions to build the container shown in the video above. So all I’m doing in this case is automating the install process, doing it once, and then deploying the container (with all of the software and dependencies installed) over and over again for different users.

Challenges

We don’t think this is the ultimate solution for our training, so much as an experiment that showcases what we can do with containerized solutions. There are some remaining challenges, and we would love to have some help from our community.

Loading firmware onto the device

Currently our plan (as shown in the video) is to have our users/trainees pull the final built binary to their local computer to run it on the device like the MagTag. This echoes the way the mbed online compiler worked.

If there is a bootloader and a USB to serial connection, it’s possible to directly load onto the embedded device. In the case of some Espressif boards, this would be something like having ESPtool.py installed locally on your machine. There are an increasing amount of tools that make this process easier, such as an ESP tool that allows you to load firmware using WebUSB. Certain specialized bootloaders like the one that comes default on the MagTag loads UF2 files. When the MagTag is plugged in over USB and a sequence of buttons are hit, the device shows up as a mass storage drive. You drop a UF2 formatted binary–which is just an alternative form of compiled format–onto the drive and the device reboots and starts running the code.

If it’s a board without a bootloader, the user would need to have a debugger and local tools to communicate with that debugger, such as a JLink device and JFlash software. This means they would still need some OS specific loader tools to get the binary into the embedded device. The user would not be able to take advantage of the built-in tools in west that allow direct loading onto the device.

You steppin’?

If you would like to do debugging instead of “printf/printk” debugging, you simply need to download a different file from the container. If you download the zephyr.elf file instead of the zephyr.bin file, you can load it into a 3rd party debugger like Segger Ozone (made by the same company as the JLink). We have done some experiments with this in the past, including also analyzing where the device is spending its time using SystemView. This would once again require installing local programs that could talk over the USB port to something like a JLink.

Experimental port forwarding and WebUSB

Some GDB debuggers/servers will host the control of the debugger over a port on the machine’s localhost. We have some experiments we’re trying where we forward this port to the container so we could directly run a debugger from a software debugger inside the container.

We have also heard some whispers of a WebUSB implementation that can tunnel to the container. So we could plug in a board on our host machine (ie. my laptop) and connect to it over WebUSB, and then forward all information along to the container machine (ie. the browser based desktop running on the Kasm server).

We would love to hear about other projects that are trying this.

Shared resources

The final challenge we are dealing with is the fact that we’re basically “renting” a computer to do exactly what we could be doing with the host machine sitting right in front of us. Most developers have access to very powerful machines and we are instead using the resources on a remote machine (the Kasm server). The cost of standardization is the cost of renting server time for each person in the workshop. It might be worth it, but it is a constraint and a challenge.

Containers are another tool

Anyone reading this with a web background is likely thinking, “Yeah, containers, cool, 2010 called and wants their headline back”. But we are excited about it because these tools are finally making their way into the historically sluggish embedded industry. While our use case of containers is mostly around zero-install-time training, others are using containers to automate their testing and implementing best software engineering practices for the range of devices they have on their desk or in the field.

We’d love to hear how you think we can improve our training and make it easier for you to learn more about Golioth, Zephyr, and building code instantly. Check out our forums, our Discord, ping us on Twitter, or send us an email at [email protected]

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