In Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series, I began to explore Advantech product engineer Ken Chang’s enlightening PowerPoint presentation entitled UTX-3115 for Internet of Things (IoT) Applications. In this blog, I will discuss Wind River’s Intelligent Device Platform.
Bringing divergent hardware and software together is a critical function of Advantech’s UTX-3115 IoT gateway, which is built upon Intel’s ATOM E3800 (Bay Trail) System on Chip. Intel has collaborated with Wind River and McAfee in developing software for the IoT gateway, and Wind River calls its contribution the Intelligent Device Platform (IDP). IDP allows the UTX-3115 to serve as an anchor point, able to acquire, analyze, aggregate and secure data before delivering it to the Cloud where it is converted into actionable information.
IDP is based upon Wind River’s standards-compliant operating systems and includes development tools and components designed specifically for developing machine-to-machine applications.
IDP addresses the three critical foundation components of IoT deployment:
- Connectivity: Smart connectivity resources are already fully integrated, delivering substantial savings on development costs. Incorporated firmware provides a comprehensive selection of connectivity options, including support for LAN, WAN, PAN and modem networking. IDP is configured for the IoT MQTT protocol with native support for all Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and short-range wireless protocols commonly deployed in IoT development.
- Manageability: IDP is fully customizable and includes an intuitive, web-based utility for configuring and managing client devices. IDP delivers Lua, Java and OSGi application environments for creation of scalable, reusable applications.
- Security: Security features include secure boot, encryption of communications between the device and Cloud, and limitation of exposure to untrusted applications.
Other features of IDP include remote device management, supporting such long-established protocols as OMA DM and TR-069.
The following are just some of the Intel ATOM peripherals enabled by IDP in the chipset:
- 802.11/a/b/g/n Wi-Fi,
- 4G and 3G wireless,
- Accelerometer,
- Gigabit Ethernet,
- HD audio,
- Temperature sensor,
- HDMI-SDVO,
- MicroSD,
- SATA,
- PCIe,
- USB,
- Modems, and
- Trusted Platform Module.
IDP use cases include predictive maintenance. IoT-connected sensors report equipment condition and performance data to central control systems via IoT gateways such as Advantech’s UTX-3115, alerting operators, technicians and managers of potential issues and facilitating responsive scheduling of inspections and maintenance. Similarly, IDP enables remote diagnostics of resilient distributed systems via the Cloud and remote corrective actions ranging from a simple system reboot to hot patching and uploading new software.
Stay tuned for the last blog in this series, which will detail Advantech’s UTX-3115.