SoEasy: A Software Framework for Easy Hardware Control Programming for Diverse IoT Platforms

Abstract

Many Internet of Things (IoT) applications are emerging and evolving rapidly thanks to widespread open-source hardware platforms. Most of the high-end open-source IoT platforms include built-in peripherals, such as the universal asynchronous receiver and transmitter (UART), pulse width modulation (PWM), general purpose input output (GPIO) ports and timers, and have enough computation power to run embedded operating systems such as Linux. However, each IoT platform has its own way of configuring peripherals, and it is difficult for programmers or users to configure the same peripheral on a different platform. Although diverse open-source IoT platforms are widespread, the difficulty in programming those platforms hinders the growth of IoT applications. Therefore, we propose an easy and convenient way to program and configure the operation of each peripheral using a user-friendly Web-based software framework. Through the implementation of the software framework and the real mobile robot application development along with it, we show the feasibility of the proposed software framework, named SoEasy.

Keywords

• visual programming tool
• Internet of Things
• Web of Things
• IoT development tool