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Mbed Connect China 2018 Recap
After our first stop in San Jose, the Mbed Connect train charged ahead to Shanghai for the third edition of Mbed Connect China. With a great mix of English and Chinese speakers, live translation services, and dim sum during the breaks, this event showed that IoT is real, and Mbed is here to help you scale. If you couldn’t make it to the show, this blog post will provide some highlights. If you’re looking for the slides: they’re here.
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It's a wrap: Mbed Connect US 2018 is done
Last Tuesday 300 participants came together in San Jose for the third annual edition of Mbed Connect, Arm’s developer conference. With nine technical sessions, nine workshops and 990 beverages consumed this was our biggest US event to date. If you were present we hope that everyone learned a ton from our speakers, workshop organizers and the other attendees; if you weren’t present, we’ve gathered the best resources from the day in this blog post.
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It's almost here - Mbed Connect US & China
Mbed Connect, Arm’s IoT Developer Conference, kicks off very soon with editions in San Jose, CA (16 October) and Shanghai (22 October).
Mbed Connect is a day-long event by developers, for developers. No marketing allowed.
Do you want to learn new skills, listen to developers that ship IoT products in volume, and play with the latest IoT technology? Get your ticket now before it’s too late!
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Making tomatoes smart at Data Science Africa 2018
For the second year in a row, Arm sponsored Data Science Africa, a machine learning and data science conference held annually in East Africa. This year took us to the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DKUT) in Nyeri, Kenya, where hundreds of students participated in a three-day summer school and an adjacent conference program. But how much data science can you actually learn from sitting in a classroom working on existing data sets? Last year we experimented with some field work (report here), but this year we made data acquisition an integral part of the summer school.
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Connecting devices to Pelion Device Management using Mbed Edge
Not every device can connect to the cloud directly. Legacy devices might not have a networking interface, and constrained devices might not have IP connectivity. To manage these devices you thus need a local gateway that understands the legacy protocol, and can bridge the data to the cloud. Mbed Edge helps you build these gateways, and bring legacy and non-IP devices into Pelion Device Management.
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IoT test automation with Mbed and Jumper
Continuous testing is critical to build safe and reliable IoT devices, but continuous IoT testing is hard. Good testing equipment is not readily available, devices must react to sensory inputs and are heavily dependent on network conditions, and running tests in parallel requires vast amounts of hardware.
At Mbed, we deal with the challenge of IoT testing by throwing huge amounts of testing equipment at the problem (for the Mbed OS 5.9 release we ran 28,000 hours of tests on real hardware); however, this approach requires a large capital investment, is very labor-intensive, and still does not cover every possible test case. Wouldn’t it be great if we could accurately model our devices, and then run our tests in a simulated environment?
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Tracking memory usage with Mbed OS
If you have ever seen the lights of dead on your development board, accompanied by an
RTX error code: 0x00000001or anOperator new out of memorymessage on the serial port, you have hit a memory overflow bug. Memory management remains a difficult problem on microcontrollers. Not only is memory limited, but also microcontrollers also do not have an MMU and therefore cannot move memory blocks around without changing addresses. This lack of virtual memory means that you have to have fixed stack sizes, so you can run into a stack overflow error even when there is still RAM available. -
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Results of the Mbed Developer Survey 2018
Three months ago, we ran the second annual Mbed Developer Survey. The fun part of doing a second survey is that you can compare data to the year before: which technology is gaining in popularity, how many developers have started production and which market segments are trending. In addition, surveys give valuable insight into what you - as the Mbed community - like and dislike and what we can do to make it easier to go to production.
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Introducing the Mbed Simulator
Try the simulator directly in the browser: Open Simulator
While we have worked hard to improve embedded development tooling in Mbed (e.g. via the Online Compiler), the development for microcontrollers is still very similar to how it was in the 90s. Compilation is slow, and flashing is even slower. When fixing a bug, you need to get the device into the exact state as it was in before encountering the bug. This makes for a very slow feedback loop, which hinders productivity and often pulls you out of the zone.
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Results from the Mbed Developer Survey 2017
Take part in the Mbed Developer 2018 survey here.
When Mbed launched in 2009 - great background post by Chris Styles here - it was hard to imagine how big the ecosystem would grow. Today we have over 70 partners, 136 supported development boards and over 15,000 commits from 405 different contributors to Mbed OS 5. But none of this was possible without you, as part of our community. Now over 325,000 developers strong, the community has published tens of thousands of libraries and examples, and answered thousands of questions about Mbed. You also compiled 13,000,000 applications in the Online Compiler last year alone.
This is an archived copy of all my blog posts which is irregularly updated.