mDash Cloud platform for IoT Devices Targets ESP8266/ESP32, STM32, and TI CC3220 Wireless MCUs

mDash firmware
Cesanta (a company based in Dublin, Ireland) recently launched mDash – an IoT cloud platform for administration of various IoT modules.

This platform supports Espressif’s modules ESP32 & ESP8266, STM32 (L4,M4) and TI CC3220, and offers a bunch of features which are known to be  challenging tasks in the IoT world.

This includes OTA (Over-The-Air) firmware updates, remote configuration and administration, alerts and notifications, remote device control and file management.

This can be achieved through 3 programming platforms – Arduino IDE, ESP-IDF and through Mongoose OS. For evaluation and testing purpose mDash offers a simulator that run as a docker container.

Refer our previous post, to understand how to get started with Cesanta’s Moongoose OS for ESP8266.

Basic WorkFlow

mDashArch

mDash Library

The company offers reference firmware/library for the defined hardware platforms. This been implements by using secure MQTT for communication, re-connection and initial provisioning with mDash cloud. You can find the library for ESP32 & ESP8266 with a few examples on Github.

Communication Protocol

The communication protocol between the mDash library (device) and the mDash Cloud been built on top of MQTT protocol, and several ways of remote device control are possible:

Device shadow

Device shadow, built on top of MQTT, mainly maintains the state of the device and custom metadata as JSON object. This will be stored at mDash Cloud, and you can easily fetch these information either via MQTT or REST API’s.

RPC

RPC – Remote Procedure Call, built on top of MQTT, sends commands to device and receives replies by using JSON-RPC 2.0.

mDash_rpc

Cloud

The cloud service and solutions offered by mDash include –

  • Device management functionality, remote control and OTA (firmware over-the-air updates).
  • Secure key based management mechanism to manage the customer with registered products, remote management and usage statics

Mobile Application

Cesanta also provides a reference PWA (Progressive Web Application) mobile application, where the user can do the provisioning and establish control over the devices quickly and easily.

mDash Features

  • OTA (Over-The-Air) Firmware Update

mDash_firmware

  • Alerts and Notifications

mDash_Alerts

  • Remote Device Control

mDash_RemoteControl

  • Device Logs

mDash_DeviceLogs

  • Device File Management

mDash File Management

  • Fleet View

mDash FleeView

Summary

While comparing to the cloud based IoT management features offered by big-giants cloud platform, mDash is having its own advantages because of the simplicity, easy to use and configure. So if anyone wants to develop IoT product with maximum 8KB of message size and not planning to deploy more than 50,000 units, Cesanta’s  Cloud platform should be an alternative option to consider.

References

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5 Comments
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miguel angel
miguel angel
5 years ago

I’m looking for an end to end customizable IOT web platform.
That mean custom dashboards, configuration sheets and customer screens.
That means one platform for a company owner, and x custom customer pages for manage
his own devices.
A future article about available end2end IOT platforms can be great.
For example Samsung artik (now dead) etc

Dean Dobson
5 years ago

See http://www.sensavation.com if you are looking for a highly customisable IoT platform, its an application builder for IoT applications with drag / drop dashboards, flow based rules and scripting.
(disclosure – I’m the founder)

miguel angel
miguel angel
5 years ago

I checked a lot of solutons,
This is new for me, but, where is the pricing?
I always refuse any solution without a public price.

Dean Dobson
5 years ago

The platform is mostly used to build IoT business applications that require a high degree of customisation, so the price depends if you need support from our team for building the solution as well as the complexity of the sensors and the number of sensors. I can’t see your email details, so email us at [email protected] and I’d be happy to walk you through the details.

John reed
5 years ago

For Linux based systems the best solution is UpSwift.io , they supports Samsung artik I think.

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