Rapid prototyping with eLBaaS

Understanding rapid prototyping with eLBaaS.

A good software engineering practice is to get feedback from its stakeholders as quickly as possible, even before developing the real product. A prototype can help in this regard. But how much time it will take to build a prototype? This is something need to find out. Getting a prototype ready for an embedded systems can be tricky cause it involves a bottom-up development approach from hardware to software. Setting up the software stack for an embedded system requires building a custom operating systems. Below diagram shows three separate concern during preparing a prototype. A quick and fast way to achieve this is to take an existing SoC ( for example: RaspberryPi ). Using a well-known SoC brings the cost of hardware part to near zero. The second section is setting up a OS for the SoC. Depending on the experience the team have it might take sometime.

Yocto is one of the well known tool for generating a custom GNU/Linux based OS. To build such a custom OS requires Yocto expertise. Which may not be common in a particular product team. It also not obvious for every developer to draw a line from developing the business application and how it have to be integrated into the OS which ends up into the customer site. When the product team likes to concentrate on application logic, focusing on embedded OS build system like Yocto brings an extra overhead for them. Just to build a prototype they need to deep dive into something that they are not suppose to and that delays critical time-to-market criteria of a product. This is where eLBaaS rapid prototyping comes in. With eLBaaS you can have an OS image capable of OTA update with-in few hours which effectively brings down the second stage to near zero. Then all you need is to develop the main application and that is 100% specific to the product itself.

eLBaaS provides a simple, easy to use tool that any developer (or even a non-developer no coding skills required!) can create an Yocto based OS with few clicks! A developer merely have to create a product specification and a build configuration. Once a build configuration is created it can be reused. Trigger a build, grab the artifact and deploy it on RaspberryPi. And you are ready to go. There is a possibility of integrating the core application of the product or it's also possible to experience the raw OS. If RPi to be used as final board ( also for the final production ) keep using this. Or if it's meant to be a prototype try to get a user feedback as well as get accustomed with the OS environment. Create new or edit existing configuration according to your necessity.

A very common scenario in any sort of engineering work is failure to comply with well-known practices. What's in the book stays in the book. Plan and execution stays far apart. A tool can provide important guideline in this regard. eLBaaS aim to be that guiding tool in IoT or embedded Linux development workspace. Helping from developing a prototype to maintain the product securely. Following link demostrate how to integrate an application to a target OS using eLBaaS.