Open Source Summit North America 2022

Deploying IoT devices in bulk, and then managing and maintaining that fleet of devices is hard work! At Balena, our customers do that everyday, and when they run into trouble, we do our best to help and support them. As a result, we’ve seen firsthand (many times over now!) how projects can succeed, or fail. In this talk, we’ll capture some of the best practices and lessons we’ve learned over the years, helping customers deploy and maintain fleets of hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of Edge and IoT devices. Specifically, we’ll discuss and explain some FleetOps strategies we’ve seen be successful, we’ll cover some basic connectivity choices and best practices for IoT devices, talk about storage media and SD Card corruption, and finish up with a quick discussion of hardware selection (which can be quite challenging with the current Chip Shortage and Supply Chain issues) based on anticipated workload and environmental constraints such as power, size, and thermal considerations. We'll be sure to leave plenty of time for questions and discussion, because attendees will likely have some stories of their own to share.

This talk will take a practical look at one transition from an asymmetric to symmetric software update mechanism. Requirements include fail-safe updates, a writable data partition, support for changing files in the update images, and the preservation of configuration information across updates. These requirements led to several interesting aspects of the design. Topics will include an overview of asymmetric and symmetric software updates, the use of the open-source RAUC project to build and apply updates, and the use of the OverlayFS union mount filesystem to combine a fixed boot image and a writable data partition.

Yocto's ecosystem provides an immense amount of tooling spanning the entire application lifecycle: from development to testing, all the way up to deployment. Migrating a mature platform utilizing an equally mature set of tooling to the Yocto ecosystem is logistically challenging. When starting a new production-scale project, Yocto provides several benefits over a Debian-based system, such as reduced resource requirements, system extensibility, and system reproducibility.  Yocto's approach, however, introduces a number of complexities when considering a migration. First, required build tools are reliant on the  Yocto community for support. Mature applications may not necessarily be built on the latest technologies with the necessary support. Second, the workflow of application developers will need to change for the new platform. There will also be a transitionary period where both application workflows need to be supported. Third, different hardware platforms will require different system images. My goal is to outline some of these complexities involved with a migration from a Debian-based system to Yocto to help you better understand if this makes migration sense for your project.

This talk is partitioned into 4 sections. It starts with a comprehensive Wi-Fi 6 introduction. Also known as high-efficiency Wi-Fi, for the overall improvements targetting dense environments, the former IEEE 802.11ax standard has been ratified early last year. The first part introduces its main concepts which amongst others go by abbreviations like OFDMA, 1024-QAM, 160 MHz channels, MU-MIMO, TWT, and WPA3. Wi-Fi 6E enabling operation of features in the unlicensed 6 GHz band is also covered. The second part looks at the Wi-Fi 6 OpenWrt AP/router landscape. The only officially supported devices are all based on the MediaTek MT7915E chipset while supporting promising Qualcomm IPQ807x resp. Qualcomm QCN5054/QCN9024 based devices is still a work in progress. Wi-Fi 6 clients are covered in the third part with the pre-dominant Intel AX200/201/210 cards, MediaTek MT7921K Wi-Fi 6E, and Qualcomm QCA6391 based clients all running mainline Linux, of course. The last part concludes with a discussion of various real-life configurations and benchmark demo use cases.