Past, Present and Future of IoT Device Prototyping Bjoern Hartmann - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Past, Present and Future of IoT Device Prototyping

Bjoern Hartmann Intel/NSF CPS-Security Final PI Meeting Stanford, CA July 13, 2018

How Technologies Take Off: The Web

Source:Pingdom/Linda Carroll

What Made the Web Take Off?

• Lots of people could create web pages and apps, not just 


Stanford/Berkeley/Michigan/UPenn/Duke PhDs

• People with domain expertise (+CS undergrads) could create 


truly useful apps for their domain, within an established technology “genre”


The Web Development Stack

Client-side logic (JS) Declarative Layout (HTML/CSS)

Browser / User

Server-side logic (*) External stores/ APIs/Infrastructure logic etc. start low, work your way up

Platform support for success

• Gradual on-ramp: Good prototyping tools 


+ low initial development complexity

• A large corpus of exemplars: “View Source” (only works for client)
• Inspection/debugging tools built into browsers
• Moving to higher levels of abstraction 


(AppEngine, WordPress, etc.)

Technologies Taking Off, Part 2?

IoT Hockeystick Graphs Everywhere…

…Or Not?

The IoT Stack

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

The IoT Stack

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

EE Mechatronics Low-level languages High-level languages

start low, work your way up

Interaction Mechanical Electronics Software

How might we enable a similar cambrian explosion of useful IoT applications in the face

• f these difficulties?

Prototyping is Key

…it’s how designers work through ideas

Early digital camera exploration, IDEO Apple IPhone Prototype

We build a lot of these…

Personal Environmental Control System (PECS) Michael Andersen, Joseph Bynoe

Anthony Sutardja Maxwell Micali Christine Dierk Zachary Gima

Sunita Venkatesh Lucy Corippo Adarsh Mani (w/ UCSF)

Simon Scott, Will Porter, Yi Tong, Mitchell Karchemsky

Michelle Nguyen Eldon Schoop

Augmented Power Tools

Laser Projector Distance Sensors Computation

What did we learn over 
 the past decade?

The Past

Add a wireless module with serial abstraction

Tx Rx

Configure and run 
 server on your own hardware Custom protocol Design circuit Connect to an 
 8-bit MCU Custom gateway

How to support IoT prototyping

• Strategy #1: 


Help people reason about and bridge boundaries in the current approach.
 


The More-Recent Present

Design circuit Sever on Azure, Amazon, etc IoT vendor-managed cloud Custom messaging

• n

pre-defined channel Connect to
 32-bit SOC/SOM w/ on-board radio

Examples: Particle, ElectricImp

How to support IoT prototyping

• Strategy #1: 


Help people bridge boundaries in the current approach

• Strategy #2: 


Replace past practice with new tools offering a 
 higher level of abstraction or integration.

How to support IoT prototyping

• Strategy #1: 


Help people bridge boundaries in the current approach

• Strategy #2: 


Replace past practice with new tools offering a 
 higher level of abstraction or integration.

Bridging Boundaries

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

ToastBoard BiFröst WiFröst

Bridging Boundaries

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

ToastBoard BiFröst WiFröst

Toast board

• Point measurements (Multimeter, Scope) require

hypothesis about circuit problem.

• Non-experts are bad at generating reasonable

hypotheses.

• Replace point measurements with ubiquitous

instrumentation (measure everything, all the time)

• Combine circuit model with real-world

measurements to diagnose problems.

Client: Checker Functions

Overcoming the debugging knowledge barrier by preemptively providing important information


Client: Checker Functions

Can diagnose errors: Or provide information:

Bridging Boundaries

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

ToastBoard BiFröst WiFröst

Trace

37

Digital Signals Analog Signals Variable Values Code line at current time User Program Time-linked console

The BiFröst IDE

38

Example: ADC Variable Overflow

Trace

39

User Program Time-linked console Trace View

Trace ⇔ Code ⇔ Console linkage

40

Code-based navigation

How to support IoT prototyping

• Strategy #1: 


Help people bridge boundaries in the current approach

• Strategy #2: 


Replace past practice with new tools offering a 
 higher level of abstraction or integration.

Raising Abstraction Levels

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

Embedded Design Generation Fabryq Ravel

Raising Abstraction Levels

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

Embedded Design Generation Fabryq Ravel

EDG: Embedded Design Generation

• Goal: Given a higher-level specification of an embedded system,

automatically generate the hardware necessary to run the code.

• What should the specification look like? We investigated 2 options:
• Code that the hardware should run
• High-level block diagram

Generating Hardware from Code

Ramesh et al, SCF 2017

Option 2: Block Diagram Specs

Interesting research: Explore Pareto front of design alternatives - optimize for cost, part availability at different quantities, community documentation, etc.

Student: Richard Lin

Design Inspiration:
 Interview Study of 15 HW Designers

OVLFY3C7 Part Number Size APG1005SYC-T 5988140107F 5mm 0402 0805 Vf 2 V 2.05 V 2 V LED Button Micro- controller

System Architecture Physical Device Parts Selection Iteration

Micro- controller ATmega32u4 Part Number Core LPC1549 FE310-G000 AVR ARM CM3 RV32IMAC +3.3v D0 D1 GND ATmega ...

Ideas and Requirements Prototype PCB Hand-built Prototypes Final PCB

Schematic Capture

• or -

paper, drawing software parts libraries, catalogs, spreadsheets Tools Used fi fi more abstract, high-level more concrete, low-level fi Design Flow breadboards EDA suites: Altium, EAGLE, KiCAD

Unsupported or under-supported by current tools

Related

Trigger-Action Circuits, 
 Autodesk 2017 Scanalog - Analog circuits via FPAAs
 Strasnick et al, Stanford 2017

Raising Abstraction Levels

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

Embedded Design Generation Fabryq Ravel

Fabryq

• Enable rapid prototyping of BLE sensor logging devices that stream

data to the web

• Motivation: Personalized medicine and home care - send patient

home with monitoring device while medical team can read data remotely

• Domain experts know about sensing, data transformation and

interpretation, not the stack in the middle

Fabryq

Core Idea: Bridge Layers!

Circuits Sensors Actuators

Physical World / User

Embedded Code Gateway Cloud

Security Implications

• A perhaps inevitable consequence of many more people building

ever more services/apps/devices: They don’t consider security in the way this room would. Many impactful breaches are not at all “sophisticated”:

• Mirai: default username/password
• Trendnet cameras: plaintext credentials transmitted
• LocationSmart: Simple JSON edit exposes location of any cell

phone in US

How can these tools help?

• Tools that help you inspect and debug your IoT device can

proactively check for problems

• Example: WiFröst router detects unencrypted login/password

passed over HTTP

• Tools that raise the abstraction level can avoid these problems by

design (application developers don’t write the critical code).

Open Steps

• Today’s consumer IoT devices are largely single device-to-device-

specific cloud. However, major value (and risk) is in interconnection.

• Current Split: low-power systems (e.g., BLE, wearables) vs. full Linux

systems (i.e., smartphone level or higher) when using audio/vision/ 3d point clouds, etc. But this is changing:
 ML co-processors are emerging in embedded space - yet another boundary - code split between general purpose and ML models.

• How might we help designers and develop create these

applications?

Q&A