New IoT Developer Projects from Eclipse and Linux Foundations -- Pure AI

New IoT Developer Projects from Eclipse and Linux Foundations

By Richard Seeley
04/18/2018

If you're an Internet of Things (IoT) developer, there's two new projects from the Eclipse and Linux foundations you may be interested in.

To start, the Eclipse Foundation has introducing Eclipse Mita, a programming language designed for embedded IoT.

"Eclipse Mita is a new project in the Eclipse IoT family which aims to remove the entry barrier to embedded IoT development and to close the gap between cloud developer experience and the embedded IoT one," commented Christian Weichel, specialist system engineering at Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, in an article in the Eclipse March newsletter. "Mita is a new programming language designed to feel like modern programming languages in the vein of TypeScript, Kotlin and Go."

Aiming to bring the cloud and embedded development communities closer together, Eclipse Mita supports "high-level features by combining a model-driven with an imperative language approach, transpiling to C," Weichel writes. Mita scales from prototype to production, he added. The newsletter article is illustrated with sample code intended to show developers what Mita can do.

Mita is a work in progress. After the initial contribution for the new language, Weichel writes that the next step on the roadmap is supporting more platforms, improving the type system and extending the event handling.

The project is looking for volunteers to help in forwarding Mita development.

Linux Foundation IoT Reference Hypervisor Project

The Linux Foundation has announced an open source reference hypervisor project designed for IoT device development.

This new embedded reference hypervisor project is called ACRN (pronounced "acorn"), and includes engineering and code contributions from Intel Corp., according to the official announcement of the project.

"The hypervisor was built with real-time and safety-criticality in mind, and optimized to streamline embedded development," the announcement said. "This project will provide a framework for industry leaders to build an open source embedded hypervisor specifically for the Internet of Things (IoT)."

ACRN consists of two components, "the hypervisor and its device model, complete with rich I/O mediators. Intel's experience and leadership in virtualization technology was key to the initial development of this hypervisor solution."

"With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option," Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, is quoted as saying. "ACRN's optimization for resource-constrained devices and focus on isolating safety-critical workloads and giving them priority make the project applicable across many IoT use cases."

A variety of use cases are accommodated by ACRN's minimized footprint, which provides flexibility when working with workloads where safety is crucially important.

"Consolidating a diverse set of IoT workloads with mixed-criticality on to a single platform helps reduce both development and deployment costs allowing for a more streamlined system architecture," according to the statement. "An example of this is the electronic control unit (ECU) consolidation in automotive applications."

The announcement touts ACRN's specific optimization for embedded and IoT products.

The ACRN project will include contributions from the open source, embedded and IoT developer communities and is seeking collaboration and code contributions. Current project members include ADLINK, Aptiv, Intel, LGE and Neusoft Corp.