background

IoT learning and development is still difficult. For beginners, the start of the road is very long: from a treasure to buy development board –> express delivery –> receive board –> figure out how to connect –> find a hub to connect a bunch of things to the computer –> install development software to get familiar with the development environment. That’s all you have to do to write the first line of code. Board selection wiring is the need for certain hardware expertise, which will let a lot of students without foundation directly give up.

At the same time, for embedded old birds, the development of IoT has also introduced new difficulties: in the past, it was easy to develop a computer and a board for equipment; Nowadays, IoT intelligent application development requires multiple devices to communicate online, which is not easy to develop. For example, a smart home house dozens of equipment, put on the ground to hang on the wall on the ceiling, how to develop? Most existing development tools do not support simultaneous development on multiple devices. With a computer development, the computer into eight claw fish are not enough, but also need to open more than ten interfaces to cut to cut, low development efficiency. If more computers are used for development, coding time is spent running around instead of focusing on solving problems.

IoT development pain points are: hardware acquisition and setup path is too long; Development tools do not support simultaneous development of multiple devices, nor do they support easy visualization of web application development. We suffer from this problem every day, so we developed uDevice Center – a flexible online multi-device development platform – to make IoT development easier

UDevcie Center is introduced

UDevice Center solves the above problems in the following ways:

  1. Move IoT devices online and make ECS for IoT: users can do IoT development by installing software without buying boards and wiring;
  2. Providing informative multi-device development capabilities: Multi-device Complex Network Development, Made Easy!

Online IoT development platform – ECS for IoT

UDevice Center brings standard IoT development boards/devices online, allowing users to use IoT development boards like ECS servers. Users simply install the software and start programming and debugging with an online development board/device instead of buying a board to connect to. The simplified development path allows programmers to focus their time and energy on the development and debugging of business logic, accelerating the process of IoT learning and development. The benefits of flexible online platforms include:

  • No need to buy connected hardware, fast
  • There is no time and place limit, can do development anywhere
  • Rich selection of development board models, with which have
  • Flexible increase or decrease in the number of development boards, with a few can

In addition, for the development of specific application scenarios (such as intelligent furniture), the flexible online platform can help developers use public resources (such as whole-house intelligent laboratory) to quickly start application development verification, reduce the development threshold and save costs.

The system architecture of uDevice Center is shown in the figure above, which consists of IoT hardware, uDevice Center Infrastructure, and client AliOS Studio software. IoT hardware devices in the system are modules/development boards/smart devices/laboratories provided by Ali and its partners. UDevice Center Infrastructure platform shields the interface differences of different hardware in firmware burning/debugging/sensing/control in a standardized way, virtualizes these IoT hardware resources in a unified way, and then provides them to the vast number of developers over the network. The client AliOS Studio software provides a user-friendly interface to use uDevice Center Infrastructure services.

In addition, uDevice Center is an open platform that can provide supporting software for manufacturers who want to access the platform, helping manufacturers quickly access devices (chips/modules, etc.) to the platform and promote the use of developers.

Multi-equipment joint development

UDevice Center is deeply integrated with AliOS Studio IDE to provide IoT developers with information-rich multi-device co-development capabilities. The user interface of uDevice Center is as follows: the middle window shows the connected devices, where each dot is an actual IoT device. The suspension window on ’07D’ C ‘displays the status information of the device in real time; The lines between points show the mesh network connection. The window on the right is the Shell interface of device ‘1d1C’.



The uDevice Center provides users with the following functions:

  • Multi-device code development/compilation/firmware burning
  • Multi-device shell command line interactive debugging and device control
  • Real-time display of device status information
  • Graphical display of uMesh connection networking

This information-rich joint development and debugging of multiple devices can accelerate the development and debugging of intelligent applications of the Internet of things.

Software Installation Procedure

Next we will explain the software to be installed using uDevice Center:

  1. Download Visual Studio Code and install it
  2. To install the Alios-Studio plug-in: Launch Visual Studio Code and follow the steps below to install it

  3. Linux OSX Windows (Optional)

UDevice Center used

The uDevice Center can be used in a flexible way, either as a standalone debugging tool for multi-device development or as a component of the AliOS Thing integrated development environment. Devices on the uDevice Center platform are allocated with Access keys. Please contact the AliOS Things team to obtain Access keys before using them (Email: [email protected] or scan to join the pins at the end of the article).

Currently supported development board models:

Esp32-devkitc (Wifi+Bluetooth) Kengke-MK3060 (Wifi) Kengke-EML3047 (LoRA) STM-Cortex M0, M3, M4, M7 seriesCopy the code

Get development board resources

Devices on the uDevice Center are allocated with Access keys. Before using the keys, contact the AliOS Things team (Email: [email protected]) to obtain Access keys. Please include the following information:

  1. Personal Information: Name Contact Company (Optional)
  2. Board resource requirements: model, quantity, usage duration, etc
  3. Brief description of purpose

Used as a separate development debugging tool

UDevice Center can be used as a separate debugging tool in the development process. In this process, users can use other tools to edit and compile the code, and then use the resulting firmware as input to the uDevice Center to develop and debug the device. The procedure for using uDevice Center alone is as follows: Use other tools to edit code, compile and generate. Bin –> Burn firmware with uDevice Center –> Debug firmware with uDevice Center

The following takes qingke MK3060 development board as an example to introduce the development and debugging process using uDevice Center alone: Step 1. Use other tools to edit the code and compile to produce a burnable. Bin firmware

Step 2. Start the uDevice Center and enter your Access Key

Step 3. Familiarize yourself with uDevice Center

Step 4. Burn the firmware

Right click on an idle MXCHIP3060 development board and select “Program” to burn the firmware generated by Step 1 to the development board. Note: please check the model of the board, if the firmware is burned to the wrong model, the board will not start

Step 5. Shell interactive debugging

Right-click the MXCHIP3060 development board burned by Step 4 and choose “Shell” to interact with the development board on the command line

Used as an integrated development tool component for AliOS Things

The typical process for using uDevice Center as part of the AliOS Things integrated development tool is to set up the AliOS Things project –> edit and compile the source code –> burn/debug the device through uDevice Center

The following uses qingke MK3060 development board as an example to introduce the development and debugging process using uDevice Center:

Step 1. Create a new project, edit and compile the code





Step 2. Start the uDevice Center. Repeat the preceding steps

Step 3. Burn the firmware

Right click on an idle MXCHIP3060 development board and select “Program Last Build” to burn the compiled firmware to the development board. Note: please check the model of the board, if the firmware is burned to the wrong model, the board will not start

Step 4. Interactive Shell debugging: Perform the same steps as above

Function points to be improved

  1. GDB code-level debugging is supported
  2. Supports richer device status display
  3. Rich hardware control functions

conclusion

UDevice Center is an online IoT multi-device development and debugging platform that enables developers to quickly and efficiently develop, debug, and test integrated IoT cloud applications. Through online hardware and virtualization, more novice developers can learn IoT development quickly and more experienced developers can develop and debug IoT applications quickly and efficiently.

Nailing group

Use AC uDevice Center to join the following pin groups