28 posts tagged with "embedded"

This article was originally for Techcrunch (available with a Techcrunch+ subscription).

The complexity associated with the development of embedded systems is increasing rapidly. For instance, it is estimated that the average complexity of software projects in the automotive industry has grown 300% over the past decade.

Today, every piece of hardware is driven by software, and most hardware is composed of multiple electronic boards running synchronized applications. Devices have more and more features, but adding features means increasing development and debugging complexity. A University of Cambridge report found that developers spend up to 50% of their programming time debugging. But there are practical ways to reduce the complex debugging of embedded systems. Let’s explore those.

We see that the community economy is becoming increasingly important in long-term winning strategies. While some will talk about marketing to a target/audience, others will talk about members and active contributors.

Luos is an open-source, real-time and lightweight distributed microservices orchestrator dedicated to embedded, edge and cyber-physical systems.

Getting started with Luos is quick and easy, however until now you were obligated to have the compatible hardware to do so.

In order to resolve this issue and make Luos accessible to anyone, we have been working on an alternative to get started without a physical board, the Luos Native.

This new feature allows you to compile and run Luos directly on your computer, eliminating the need for hardware at the beginning.

As a result, you can develop and test your Luos projects in a computer environment.

In the fields of embedded and IoT design, hardware devices and software have traditionally been closely connected, and as systems have become more intricate, this coupling has only grown stronger.

While microservices are often used for building large and complex software applications, cyber-physical systems are typically used for building software systems embedded in physical devices and with a direct impact on the physical world. Let's discover the benefits and challenges of using philosophies such as microservices to develop cyber-physical systems.

As we mentioned on our previous article, cyber-physical systems (CPS) are a type of systems that integrates computational and physical elements to perform tasks that involve both the physical world and the digital world. These systems are used in various applications, from manufacturing and transportation to healthcare and energy production. We are surrounded by them.

Luos and Freedom Robotics have partnered up to create a bridge that makes it easier to monitor embedded systems fleet information from the cloud.

Updating multiple boards from different brands without having to be physically connected to each one can help an embedded and edge developer.

Last week we organized a Q&A session live to answer your questions concerning Luos or anything related to embedded systems. This Livestream was held on October 11th, 2022

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Alexis Gorlier; I am a student in aerospace engineering at ESTACA (a French school specializing in mobilities). I'm very invested in an association named ESO (Estaca Space Odyssey), which is part of my school and allows students to work on real space projects. This article will present a project I am working on in my association, and show the issues linked to this project.

This is the second part of our article concerning our latest Q&A live session on Discord. Please read the first part before the following.

A few days ago, we held our first live Q&A session on Discord, and it was a pleasure to exchange with all of you. This session was organized on August 10, 2022.

If you missed it or want to discover it again, we have concatenated all your questions in this article and completed them with precise answers.

If you have other questions concerning Luos, our open source project, or the embedded world, feel free to join our Discord community. We are +4000 community as of right now and keep in touch with our members daily to create a strong community and an inspiring place for everyone.

Certainly, you have already used or heard about ROS, the Robot Operating System. Using the functionalities provided in ROS libraries, you can develop software applications and control your robots easily and optimally.

Some IoT, edge and embedded projects should not involve such a dependence on hardware.

The dependency would lead to a limitation of possibilities.

Open source has opened the gate to a new way of thinking in the embedded domain. Breaking away from the monolithic vision to focus on microservices is a choice that has many advantages.

With the Luos development team, we are constantly working on integrating our solution with the tools you use.

Great News! Luos engine is now plug-and-play-compatible with the ESP32 family!

At Luos, we often talk about embedded systems and edge, but a term often resurfaces in our everyday vocabulary: Cyber-physical systems (CPS).

This is the term that best describes the type of smart system Luos can manage since it is totally designed as a network of MCU that interact with each other through physical inputs and outputs. CPSs are, therefore, somewhat different from embedded and edge systems, which are autonomous interacting devices.

What is the problem here?

At Luos, we deal with distributed (multi-MCU) critical and real-time environments. Everything in our technology has been thought to be fast and lightweight. The Robus protocol (our basic protocol) has been designed to have the minimal latency possible, but we still have some!

Marie#9390 in our Discord has developed a biometric security system using Luos.

As you know, in 2021, a global semiconductor crisis occurred as the industry's capacity failed to meet the increasing demand for semiconductors. This leads to a sharp increase in prices and a shortage of semiconductors available on the market.

Let's talk about Embedded Services.

A family photo shared on a social network. An interesting news article. A funny video of a cat. It all starts with a website. A website needs a few things, notably a database. You ask for the website for your link, and the website gets data from different services, formats it into something pretty, and then returns that to you. The World Wide Web is literally that, a web of services. Websites fetching data from other websites, from databases, from authentification services, from data storage servers... And you don't need to know where those services are. They might be located on the same server, or they might be in the same building, or they might even be on the other side of the planet. Everything just works.

Imagine the liberty of being on a sailboat, alone, in the middle of the ocean. What skills would you require for that? First of all, basic (or even advanced) knowledge of sailing, you are all alone, with only the wind to help you move. Secondly, navigation, the art of knowing where you are, where you want to go, and how. Cooking, there are no delivery services possible, and you need to survive for over a month. Medical skills, if something goes wrong and you hurt yourself, you are the only first responder. Maintenance, fixing things that break down? And this is only part of a very long list.

Back in the past of the history of flight

A 193,1 million USD loss because of a bad conversion

The way electronic devices are made never evolved

The issue. To talk about Edge and Embedded systems, let’s consider the place where related issues are their climax: Robotics. For a long time now, there has been talks of a robotic revolution that seems to be continually pushed back to the next day. Robot vacuum cleaners, IOT, the autonomous cars are the beginnings of this change. But why is it so slow?

This article is about the path taken during a couple years to explain what Luos is. Although Luos is a name for the company and the technology behind it, it’s the technology in particular I will mostly talk about, and how we sometimes struggled to explain it. Regarding the company in general, we will see why Luos is not a robotics company.