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Deploying IoT Devices with Wind River Helix Device Cloud | Digit.in

Deploying IoT Devices with Wind River* Helix* Device Cloud

Wind River* Helix* Device Cloud enables remote management and monitoring of your Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices and gateways, scaling to thousands of devices. This article explores the benefits of Device Cloud and describes some of the capabilities it provides for deployed devices.

Introducing Wind River* Helix* Device Cloud

Device Cloud is a cloud-based service designed to manage and monitor IoT devices at large scales. Building an IoT device can be a challenge in itself, but attempting to manage thousands or hundreds of thousands of these deployed devices can be an uphill battle.

Device Cloud takes care of many of the common management and monitoring tasks associated with IoT deployments, including securely capturing and monitoring data from disparate devices, supporting mass configuration, and even firmware updates. All these capabilities come through a single, web-based console.

As Figure 1 shows, Device Cloud monitors and manages devices over the Internet and exposes a web-based console and Representational State Transfer (REST)-ful application programming interfaces (APIs) to enterprise applications to provide full access to deployed devices around the world.

As Figure 1 shows, Device Cloud monitors and manages devices over the Internet and exposes a web-based console and Representational State Transfer (REST)-ful application programming interfaces (APIs) to enterprise applications to provide full access to deployed devices around the world.

Figure 1. Internet of Things management with Wind River* Helix* Device Cloud [Source: Created and drawn by author; all other images from the Wind River* Dev Cloud website.]

Let’s jump into Device Cloud so that you can see how to view devices, monitor them, and even create rules to create alerts automatically when other rules are satisfied.

Scaling your IoT deployment

IoT devices generate data and require management, configuration, and monitoring, all at new scales. Because of these scales, new requirements such as autonomous operation (removing the human in the loop) arise. Using Device Cloud, you can easily reduce the complexities of dealing with large numbers of devices, all through a cloud-based platform.

Device Cloud enables the management of devices (end points through which data can be collected and actuators manipulated). Each device includes an embedded software agent that cooperates with Device Cloud for a variety of actions. Figure 2 shows those devices that are currently being managed and can be selected for a standard or custom action.

Figure 2. Viewing devices in the Wind River* Helix* Device Cloud console

In Figure 2, you can see a scrollable list of devices that have been registered in Device Cloud, with some identifying information: the unique ID for the device, its media access control (MAC) address, and the operating system running on the device. Near the upper-right corner is a search bar that dynamically filters the list of devices based on search criteria that you provide. As shown in Figure 3, I’ve indicated a portion of the MAC address to view only those devices that match this criterion. This is an important feature: If you want to update a given set of devices (using the UPDATES list), the search feature allows you to restrict the set of devices based on your needs. Read more…