Eclipse Hara: Updating Embedded Devices with hawkBit Made Easy

Eclipse hawkBit is a popular domain-independent back-end framework for deploying software updates to any kind of embedded device. As part of their update flow, those devices communicate with the server using hawkBit’s Direct Device Integration (DDI) API, to ask for available updates or send out state change notifications and much more.

The Eclipse Hara project aims to provide solid open-source reference implementations of a hawkBit DDI client. In this talk, we’ll focus on the new hara-ddiclient, a Kotlin library designed to facilitate and speed up the development of DDI API clients for any device capable of running on the JVM. Furthermore, the hara-ddiclient library is designed to be agnostic with respect to the type of update to install (apps, OS OTA).

We’ll present how the project came about and why the experience gained during several years of using it in the field will benefit developers using the hara-ddiclient library on any OS.

Transcript

1. Eclipse Hara Updating Embedded Devices with hawkBit Made Easy Matteo Di Pirro & Nicola La Gloria Kynetics LLC - Santa Clara, CA
2. Agenda • Who we are • A glance at Eclipse hawkBit • Eclipse Hara • Native Services • Virtual Devices • Hara 2022 Enhancements • Conclusion
3. About us • We provide OSes and Applications for embedded systems ◦ Android ◦ Open Embedded • UpdateFactory ◦ Software as a Service to update remote devices at scale ◦ Based on Eclipse hawkBit • Members of the Eclipse Foundation ◦ Maintainers of Project Hara ◦ IoT Working group ◦ Edge Native Working Group & Edge Native Steering Committee 1/12
4. Eclipse hawkBit: helicopter view 2/12
5. Why project Hara • hawkBit provides solid backend/API but no client implementation ◦ Need for hawkBit client supporting update workflows • Linux devices already taken care of ◦ SWUpdate ◦ RAUC + hawkBit Updater • Internal design of an Android hawkBit client ◦ Upon DDI API ◦ Customer deployments • Need for a JVM-based OS-agnostic reusable library 3/12
6. Eclipse Hara: helicopter view • Kotlin library to speed up the development of hawkBit DDI native clients • OS independent • Architecture dependent ◦ Based on JVM (available for many architectures) • Agnostic with respect to the update artifacts (apps, OS OTA, …) • Designed to facilitate the integration of native update Services 4/12
7. hawkBit & Hara: the full picture 5/12
8. Eclipse Hara: use cases • Download artifacts from the server • Provide feedback • Send device attributes • Ask for pending actions 6/12
9. Eclipse Hara: internals • ddi-consumer ◦ Implementation of a REST client for DDI API • hara-ddclient-api ◦ Interfaces towards the Update Server ◦ Actor-based • virtual-device ◦ Simple app using hara-ddiclient-api ◦ Reference implementation 7/12
10. Native Service and Consumer • Service ◦ Wrapper around the DDI logic ◦ Runs in background ◦ OS-dependent ◦ Contains target device’s update logic • Consumer (App) ◦ Application should interact with Service (monitoring, configuration, …) 8/12
11. Service and Application drive the update logic! • User experience • Outages/timeouts handling • Single/double copy updates • Updates of the native service itself • Error handling 9/12
12. Hara and virtual devices Pings Runs Virtual Devices Pool 10/12
13. Video 11/12
14. Hara latest enhancements (Oct 2022) • Schedule the download and application of an update for both soft and forced • Configure the number of download attempts and the time between such attempts ◦ Android Client implements this feature with exponential back-off • Verbose messages from the client to the Update Server ◦ Reason of failure ◦ Time to the next attempt • Target Attributes sent at every polling if ◦ They are actually updated ◦ Server requests, explicitly, to receive the target attributes
15. Conclusion Updating embedded devices made easy 1. DDI logic separated from device-specific Service ◦ Easy to create custom Native Services 2. Testing with multiple (virtual) devices ◦ No need for physical boards 12/12
16. Let’s increase clients availability to spread the use of hawkBit! Thank you Matteo Di Pirro matteo.dipirro@kynetics.com Nicola La Gloria nicola.lagloria@kynetics.com
17. Useful Links • https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/iot.hawkbit.hara • https://github.com/eclipse/hara-ddiclient • https://www.eclipse.org/hawkbit/ • https://www.kynetics.com • https://github.com/kynetics