6 posts tagged with "iot"

AWS IoT Greengrass, or Greengrass for short, is a way of deploying software to an edge device, like a server on a factory floor, and managing the lifecycle of that software. From the cloud you can configure the software that is deployed to the edge and how that software is configured, as well as build your own software to be deployed by Greengrass.

There are three parts: building and deploying software applications, the device(s) that those applications are being deployed to, and the management service doing the deployment. This post goes over each part to explain how Greengrass as a whole works, and how you can try it out for yourself.

This post was originally published as a video, but given how many people it has helped, converting it to a blog post made sense. If you prefer video format, click below.

This post is about connecting ROS2 robots to the cloud with a quick and simple Greengrass setup. I'll guide you through building a sample component that can be hosted on a server connected to your robot fleet, which will connect the robots to AWS IoT Core without modifying the robot software in any way. Setup requires installing only a few prerequisites. Let's see how it works!

This post is also available in video form, if you want to follow along:

Congratulations! You have a whole lab full of robots running your latest software. Now you want to start looking at an overall view of your robots. It's time to build a fleet overview, and this post will show you how to use Fleet Indexing from AWS IoT Device Management to start your overview.

Fleet Indexing is a feature of AWS IoT Core that collects and indexes information about all of your selected Things and allows you to execute queries on them and aggregate data about them. For example, you can check which of your Things are online, giving you an easy way to determine which of your robots are connected.

I want to walk you through this process and show you what it looks like in the console and using Command Line Interface (CLI) commands. We'll be using the sample code from aws-iot-robot-connectivity-samples-ros2, but I've forked it to add some helper scripts that make setup a little easier for multiple robots. It also adds a launch script so multiple robots can be launched at the same time.

This guide is also available in video form - see the link below!

This post shows how to build two simple functions, running in the cloud, using AWS Lambda. The purpose of these functions is the same - to update the status of a given robot name in a database, allowing us to view the current statuses in the database or build tools on top of it. This is one way we could coordinate robots in one or more fleets - using the cloud to store the state and run the logic to co-ordinate those robots.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!

In this post, I'll show how to use two major concepts together:

1. Docker images that can be privately hosted in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR); and
2. AWS IoT Greengrass components containing Docker Compose files.

These Docker Compose files can be used to run public Docker components, or pull private images from ECR. This means that you can deploy your own system of microservices to any platform compatible with AWS Greengrass.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!

This post shows how to build a Robot Operating System 2 node using Rust, a systems programming language built for safety, security, and performance. In the post, I'll tell you about Rust - the programming language, not the video game! I'll tell you why I think it's useful in general, then specifically in robotics, and finally show you how to run a ROS2 node written entirely in Rust that will send messages to AWS IoT Core.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!