Have you ever struggled to integrate embedded devices in your application logic? Especially when your application may also run everywhere across the cloud to thing continuum? For a long time, stitching together multiple communication technologies has been the obvious way to go for making microcontrollers part of your application. But a new time has come.
Eclipse Zenoh has proven to be a unified solution for the Cloud-to-Things continuum for efficiently distributing data, greatly improving the wire efficiency of existing protocols while providing higher level abstractions.
In this talk, you will learn about Zenoh-Pico: a Zenoh-based implementation that helps developers to support constrained devices in their application logic. You will also learn how commonly used protocols compare with Zenoh-Pico with respect to performance, latency, footprint, wire overhead, and energy consumption. And finally, the fun part: you will learn how to build an embedded application based on Zenoh-Pico to remotely control a tiny and cute robot.
Background:
The digitalization of several industries and the widespread adoption of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have been pushing new applications, services, and use cases that require scalable, and extremely performant (e.g., high throughput and low latency) data-oriented solutions. Connected cars, smart factories, swarms of robots are some examples. These scenarios have one element in common: microcontrollers and embedded systems are going to play a crucial part.
This means that applications can operate beyond standalone systems limited to onboard capabilities, and start exploiting the ubiquitous computing, storage, and networking capabilities available anywhere in the network and at any time. Data distribution and storage hence become of paramount importance in this scenario. As a consequence, data distribution protocols face new challenges to ensure vertical and horizontal scalability while dealing with both data in motion and data at rest as well as constrained networks and devices with low duty cycle (devices that are disconnected/sleeping most of the time).
Protocols used today to build these systems, such as DDS-XRCE, MQTT, OPC-UA, CoAP and even HTTP were not designed with these requirements in mind nor considering the whole Cloud-to-Thing continuum. This forces today’s architects and developers to undergo a complex patchwork design in which multiple protocols are stitched together to provide some meaningful end-to-end semantics for data.
Eclipse Zenoh is designed with the Cloud-to-Thing continuum in mind, making it a unified solution possible to be adopted in any segment of the continuum, including supporting the requirements and needs of the aforementioned scenarios. Thus, this talk will include:
- Motivation: to describe the increasing importance of the “Things” for many upcoming use cases in several vertical industries like robotics and automotive.
- Challenges: why constrained devices, like microcontrollers and embedded systems, cannot be handled today in the same way as more powerful devices like cloud servers.
- Zenoh + Zenoh-Pico: a powerful combination to handle any kind of data across the entire Cloud-to-Things continuum including different types of network.
- Hands-on session: a live walkthrough demo on how to program the embedded board of a tiny robot to use Zenoh-pico for tele operation.
- Wrapup: main takeaways and lessons learnt from the last year developing Zenoh and Zenoh-Pico.
