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IOT

Human Friendly Industrial Device IDs

Do you deploy 10’s to 1000’s of devices and need to quickly identify them in the field for configuration, maintenance, or troubleshooting? This article explores how this can be made much easier by using device IDs that are easy for humans to process.

In a previous article (A Survey of device ID mechanisms), we explored some of the commonly used options (MAC addresses, UUID, 2D barcodes, etc.). However, most of these are optimized for consumer devices and scenarios where machines process the IDs.

Why are human-friendly IDs important? Consider a few scenarios:

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Struggling to scale your IoT system? Simplify your data.

Have you struggled with adapting your IoT system to new applications and requirements? Is handling configuration updates at both the cloud and edge a challenge? Is synchronizing required data between cloud and edge instances a challenge? This article describes a simple way to model data that eliminates many of these difficulties.

We can scale an IoT system both horizontally (deploy more units) and vertically (add features and address new applications). While the ideas presented in this essay are focused on vertical scale, any simplification will likely help with horizontal scale as well.

Previously, we explored data-centric architectures in IoT systems. This post expands on this by describing how to represent data using Nodes and Points in a way that drastically simplifies IoT data storage, exchange, and synchronization. This is in contrast to encodings and mechanisms used in traditional web and cloud systems.

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Layered, Event, and Data-Centric Architectures in Distributed IoT Systems

With the advent of the browser, cloud, embedded Linux systems, and networked microcontrollers, distributed systems are everywhere. There are many models for communication in distributed systems — we will look at the tradeoffs between three of them. There are many perspectives to consider — initial implementation, client libraries, maintenance, adding features now and in the future, client compute and storage requirements, network bandwidth, data structure, etc. This article will discuss a number of these concerns and present several options.

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Understanding the NXP i.MX6UL Pin Mux

(note, the article is also applicable to the i.MX6ULL as these processors are very similar)

The NXP i.MX6UL application processor has a very flexible pin multiplexer, that is somewhat difficult to understand at first glance.  Most times when we’re configuring the pin mux in Linux, we modify Device Tree files, so perhaps that is the place to start.  The pin mux options for the i.MX6UL are defined in the arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6ul-pinfunc.h file.  The arguments to the macros in this file are defined as:

/*
 * The pin function ID is a tuple of
 * <mux_reg conf_reg input_reg mux_mode input_val>
 */

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IOT Protocols: MQTT vs CoAP vs HTTP

With the explosion of IOT (Internet of things), there are now more technologies we can use to build systems.  In reality, we’ve been doing IOT for years.  We’ve been networking devices for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data from remote nodes.  This is nothing new, but what the IOT movement brings to the table is technologies that are much lower cost, and more standardized.  Two of these technologies are MQTT and CoAP.  Both very interesting, and very useful.  Recently, I helped a system manufacturer think through the architecture of a system with the following requirements:

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