Originally published at: What is Golioth OTA? - Golioth
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are meant to be out in the world, sending back sensor data and providing remote control for all kinds of automation. That provides an interesting challenge when you want to update the way the device operates. Updating device firmware Over-The-Air (OTA) is a critical feature of every IoT deployment. While OTA updates go by a number of names (DFU, FOTA, etc.) Golioth specializes in making these features available and easy to manage for huge fleets made up of numerous different hardware variants. OTA Is Difficult We know what you’re thinking… your design is feature complete when manufactured, why update the firmware? Just kidding, we know you’d never say that. This isn’t about how well you can write the device code today. Including the ability to remotely update firmware will extend the service life of your products, whether it’s adding features you haven’t yet thought about, or patching security vulnerabilities that don’t currently exist. Everyone needs this! So why aren’t firmware update features more common in embedded devices, especially those that are going to be IoT devices? In short: because it’s difficult! When an engineer starts a new embedded project, it is almost always local to their development laptop or desktop. They compile and flash “hello world” to their embedded device and then try to get an LED blinking. If the engineer is starting with a simple main.c file and expecting to build things up from there, they need to layer on network stacks, IP handling, message parsing, and a bunch more just to talk to the internet. Then they need to set up the Cloud side of things. Maybe the engineer expects they can fetch from…