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Eclipse M2M

What is Koneki?

Ahem. Long time no talk on this blog… sorry about that  🙄

I have been spending the last few months working on the definition of what would be the requirement of an Open Source M2M development environment, which has led to the Koneki project proposal. You may have not seen the proposal, so let me use this blog post to explain the purpose of Koneki with more details than in the proposal.

M2M you said?

Yup, M2M. I apologize to Modeling Gurus, but I do not really mean “Model-to-Model”, but rather Machine-to-Machine. That is to say, the technologies that allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of the same ability.

Let me take the example of a company who sells a home automation solution. This company wants to provide the end-user with a turnkey packaging including a communicating box acting as a gateway between the peripherals (thermostats, light dimmers, alarm system, …) deployed in the house, and a server in charge of centralizing the collected data. The server will then allow both the house owner to remotely monitor is house (e.g. use an iPhone application to turn the heat down), and the solution vendor to manage its fleet in centralized manner (deploy firmware upgrades, collect usage statistics, etc.).

Tooling for M2M development

While it is fairly reasonable to say that half of the time needed to develop an M2M solution is spent solving problems related to the embedded nature of such a development, there are still a few areas that are not covered by nowadays embedded development

Protocols support

M2M solutions usually involve the use of two different kinds of protocols, both of which need to be supported by an M2M-oriented IDE.

  1. Embedded protocols – These are the protocols allowing an M2M module to communicate with the assets it is connected to. In the Home Automation use case, that would be the dimmers, the temperature sensors, and so on, and the protocol would likely be X10. For other use cases, we would have Modbus, Zigbee, or virtually any kind of proprietary communication protocol over Ethernet, RS-232, or whatever.
    Supporting these protocols in Eclipse consist in giving developers the ability to interact with the assets independently of their protocols: configure them, access values, send commands, etc. It is also interesting to provide a protocol analyzer (a la Wireshark) allowing to get a human-readable “dump” of all the frames exchanged by the M2M module and its assets.
  2. Client/server protocols – These are the protocols allowing a box to communicate with an M2M Server. The M2M server is in charge of centralizing data (temperature, …) and events (fire alarm, …) sent by all the devices paired with it, as well as to send commands (dim the light, …) to these devices. The M2M server usually exposes Web Services APIs to allow system integrators or end-users to manipulate the data to build their own UIs (web sites, mobile phone applications, …).
    There are many M2M use cases where the communication between the box and the server is made using GPRS or 3G connection (Home Automation might not be one of these use cases, because the Internet connectivity is likely provided by an ADSL box…). For these use cases – where we’re speaking of thousand of billboards, solar panels, power meters, … – it is very important to use a dedicated protocol which optimizes the bandwidth usage. Koneki will provide the developer with a way to easily “decode” binary frames into a human-readable form, relying on an extensible mechanism allowing to plug-in support for any protocol.
    Since mobile communication costs tend to be quite expensive,  we want to give the developer more visibility on the bandwidth consumption of its application. For example, will it use more bytes to send a temperature value every 5 minute, or instead send 12 acquired values every 1 hour (possibly benefiting from a compression algorithm).

Component model

In order to enhance software reuse across different M2M applications, Koneki will expose a data/event-driven component model allowing to isolate correctly every functionality of the system. The development environment will use the component model to provide the developer with ways to validate the consistency of its application, to generate its documentation, or even use a visual programming approach to design components graphically (a la Google App Inventor)

Simulation

M2M servers usually are hosted solutions (SaaS or PaaS), making it a bit difficult to diagnose communication problems of an M2M embedded application. Koneki will provide an M2M server simulator to give the developer a better understanding of how his M2M box is interacting with the server, how it deals with timeouts, communication errors, etc.

Lua support

Many M2M modules are programmable using the Lua language (very lightweight scripting language). We not only want to improve the support of Lua itself in Eclipse (another Eclipse project may be created as soon as this tooling becomes mature enough), but also improve the integration of vendor-specific stuff such as: packaging of Lua libraries, communication with remote applications using LuaRPC, etc.

Contribution opportunities

If you’ve gone through the Koneki proposal, you’ve seen that Sierra Wireless’ initial seed will be largely Linux oriented, since this is the OS that Sierra modules are running. However, there are many other M2M modules out there, some of them offering a JVM with an OSGi runtime, other are running dedicated RTOS (e.g. Nucleus) exposing C or C++ APIs, etc. And we want Koneki to seamlessly support all theses different flavors of M2M environments.
Kai Kreuzer from openHAB (a very-cool OSGi-based runtime for Home Automation, with Eclipse tooling easing the configuration of the system) has already expressed interest in the project, and we are also looking forward to work with the Itemis guys behind Yakindu (a modeling environment for embedded systems) to come up with a common component model for M2M systems.

Koneki project is in its proposal phase, so please let us know (best way to do so is to use the dedicated Eclipse Forums thread) if you have any interest in it, … the more the merrier!

Learn more

I'm going to EclipseCon 2011

I will be at EclipseCon this week, along with my workmate Gaétan Morice, so please feel free to come ask us further information on Koneki. Also, we will run a “Machine-to-Machine at Eclipse” BoF on Wednesday, 7.30pm (be careful, the room is likely to change). The aim of the BoF will be to discuss not only the requirements for an M2M IDE – which is the scope of Koneki, but, more generally, what an M2M reference environment should be: standard client/server communication protocol(s), programming model, component model, etc.

Oh, and by the way, Koneki is a Maori word meaning “here”, “this place” ; and is  a great metaphor of M2M: you communicate with many remote devices without moving from where you are.

By Benjamin Cabé

Benjamin Cabé is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. He has invented an award-winning open source and open hardware artificial nose that he likes to use as an educational platform for people interested in diving into the world of embedded development.
He is currently a Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project at the Linux Foundation and lives near Toulouse, France, where he enjoys baking sourdough bread with the help of his artificial nose.

3 replies on “What is Koneki?”

Hi Andrew,

Actually I am very aware of Open AT, that was a poor wording on my side to say “Linux […] the OS that Sierra modules are running”. The plan is to Open Source the set of tools allowing to develop for Linux platforms, since this is where there is the most interest for the M2M community at large. Please also note that there are many things in Koneki that are not directly related to “actual” development, and thus are not really related to Linux, OpenAT, Lua, or whatever: support to manipulate protocols, simulators for client/server communication, utilities to help configure M2M devices, …

I am not sure I understand your concern about Lua support being a restriction?
C development, if this is why your talking about, is of course still possible, we just put a bit more effort on the Lua stuff because it opens the door to great tooling (e.g. LuaRPC to remotely configure the target, Lua packaging mechanism –LuaRocks– to package and provision applications, …)

Thanks very much for your feedback, and I hope I have clarified things 🙂

Hi Benjamin Cabé,
I am interested in M2M communcation.
I do not know how to install Koneki.
Could you tell me how to install it?
Thank you!

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