New Yocto recipes will make embedded devices smarter

During the OpenIoT summit, embedded software developer and AllSeen Alliance member Beechwoods Software released open source Yocto ‘recipes’ that make it easier for developers to easily and quickly integrate the AllJoyn codebase into Yocto.  (AllJoyn is a system that allows devices to device communication; Yocto is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods for creating custom Linux-based systems for embedded products.) With these recipes, Beechwoods is helping developers streamline the process of building AllJoyn-enabled products by reducing cost and complexity and speeding time-to-market for connected IoT services, apps and devices.

Brad Kemp, CEO of Beechwoods Software, explained to me that Yocto is a very rich environment for building but is hard to set up. Once it’s set up, however, it becomes very easy for everyone to use. What Beechwoods has done is taken care of that hard part by developing recipes to build for AllJoyn. They did this work for their own projects but then open sourced it so others can also benefit from it. Now device-makers can focus on the core services of their devices – whether it’s a smart heater or a smart bulb – instead of worrying about AllJoyn.

“What we have done is taken the AllJoyn build environment and allowed Yocto builds to use it seamlessly. Vendors can just point their Yocto recipes at AllJoyn recipes and [they] will automatically be built into their product. Its very easy for them to add AllJoyn without doing all the work that we did,” said Kemp.

AllJoyn is currently being used by more than 270 million devices, according to Noah Harlan, community director and president of the cross-industry device interoperability consortium AllSeen Alliance and founder of application developer Two Bulls. He told me that AllJoyn is being used heavily in Windows 10, it’s used by LG, Electrolux and many other IoT devices. The contribution by Beechwoods Software allows developers to write applications for interoperability regardless of transport layer, manufacturer, and without the need for Internet access, freeing them to focus on differentiating their devices from competitors.