Internet of Things
Navigating supply chain issues with virtualization and remote monitoring
By Mohammed Billoo, founder, MAB Labs Embedded Solutions O
ne of the biggest problems that Internet of Things (IoT) product companies face nowadays is hardware availability. Current supply
chain issues make production of existing products and development of new products difficult. For example, acquisition of electronic components, tablets, and new vehicles has made development harder, if not impossible, for telematics solutions providers. According to Gartner, any organization that relies on microchips and microprocessors are now constrained, whether it be in continuing operations or new product development (
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what- s-ahead-for-semiconductor-shortages). Specifically, supply chain issues make it difficult for embedded software engineers to test their implementations.
However, virtualization and hardware emulation are alternatives that can alleviate development issues. For example, QEMU is a popular platform that can be used to test and evaluate embedded software solutions without any custom hardware. It can run on any x86 (i.e. Intel/AMD) based development PC and emulate instructions from other architectures, such as ARM. As a matter of fact, when the Linux community was introducing support for RISC-V in the kernel, the first task they undertook was to incorporate RISC-V support in QEMU. QEMU also has native support of popular
Figure 2: DevAlert Cloud Backend Figure 1: STM32 F4 Discovery board
microcontroller development boards. Besides expediting development, virtualization can also allow companies to deliver solutions into the hands of their customers for initial testing. Rather than asking a potential customer to acquire the necessary hardware and set up a dedicated test environment, an organization can package their solution with the necessary virtualization technologies to allow their customers to test drive an initial solution. This saves both time and money for their customers and it can also greatly speed up the feedback loop. Organizations that deliver Edge/IoT based solutions can quickly iterate based on the feedback received from
their customers and improve the quality of their product offering.
Percepio’s DevAlert Sandbox Percepio’s DevAlert Sandbox is an example of a complete solution that incorporates virtualization to emulate a non-trivial IoT elevator control application. It demonstrates detection and reporting of anomalous behavior to their cloud-based DevAlert service, along with detailed operating system level traces. The included application targets a STM32 F4 Discovery board.
Although DevAlert Sandbox primarily is a complete solution that demonstrates the capabilities of Percepio’s DevAlert offering, it
also contains all the necessary tooling to allow organizations to create their own FreeRTOS based application with event monitoring. Specifically, it contains the necessary scripts and services to listen for critical events that are being monitored and send them to the DevAlert cloud service. The virtual machine also contains QEMU to emulate the STM32 F4 Discovery board, and this can be used to emulate other microcontroller- based evaluation boards. For example, if we wanted to develop and “run” a simple application that monitors and reports when the button is pressed and illuminates an LED, we can do so with the DevAlert Sandbox. After compiling the FreeRTOS based application, we can launch it in QEMU using the following invocation:
$> ~/.local/xPacks/@xpack-dev-tools/ qemu-arm/7.0.0-1.1/.content/bin/ qemu-system-gnuarmeclipse -board STM32F4-Discovery --image Debug/devalert- qemu-freertos-test.elf
After executing the above command, we would see the following UI in the Sandbox VM, and if we clicked on the blue push button we would see the LED illuminate. Additionally, if we log into the DevAlert backend, we would be able to see that the events corresponding to these button presses have been registered. Percepio’s DevAlert Sandbox is an example of how virtualization and hardware emulation technologies can be combined into a cohesive package, allowing organizations that provide
Edge/IoT offerings to continue developing their solutions without having to wait for hardware availability. Additionally, companies can quickly deliver these packages to their respective customers for initial testing and providing feedback, which would result in quicker iteration of their solution and a higher quality product.
https://mab-labs.com/
www.cieonline.co.uk. Components in Electronics March 2023 35
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