EmbedThis 2024 Recap

The year 2024 has been a huge year for EmbedThis® and our customers. Our device management solutions where enhanced in all dimensions: device agents, cloud service and device builder portal. We’ve pushed new limits with achievable scale of over 10M devices supported in a single device cloud and we’ve had great traction with smaller project makers and large scale device builders alike.

EmbedThis has been creating and delivering embedded solutions for over 20 years focusing on networking, consumer electronics and factory automation verticals. We’ve had great success and our software is included in over 600 products and over 210 million devices. But in 2024 we stepped on the accelerator and expanded our offering to include a complete, end-to-end device management solution for cloud-based management. Our next generation Ioto® device agent is being deployed as a cloud-connected device agent and as a stand-alone embedded web server for local device management.

Ioto Middleware

It’s not about creating another IoT platform — it’s about enhancing the existing platforms we already have. By layering better tools, management apps, data management, visual analytics and proven design patterns, we’ve empowered the creation of secure device management solutions faster and with more powerful capabilities.

In 2024, our development of the Ioto middleware significantly enhanced AWS IoT, evolving it from a collection of basic building-block components into a comprehensive, end-to-end IoT solution. Ioto encompasses a device agent, an embedded web server for local management, cloud-based device management, a device builder portal, and a visual low-code app designer. By delivering IoT middleware that enhances AWS IoT rather than replacing it, we give our customers all the benefits of the AWS scale and reliability with our value of a complete IoT solution.

Key Milestones

Here are some of the key milestone features we were able to deliver in 2024.

Low-Code App Designer

One of the biggest enhancements was the addition of our ground-breaking visual low-code app designer to quickly create device management interfaces for mobile and desktops.

Developing a user interface for device management solutions often represents a significant investment, consuming considerable time and resources. It is not uncommon for this phase to require multiple person-years of developer effort to achieve the desired UI.

Ioto addresses this challenge by offering a low-code app designer. The app designer allows you to combine graphical, interactive widgets to create composite UI pages specifically for your device. You can do this in a drag-n-drop, click-n-configure style of design. But we’ve achieved this without compromising configurability. You still have the ability to create custom UI components with full access to the underlying code to modify as you wish.

Device Management Framework

Assisting the App Designer, we delivered the Device Management Framework (DMF) which is a device management VueJS foundation library for creating responsive mobile and desktop device management apps.

The DMF handles essential tasks like user authentication, state management, sensor data capture, storage and synchronization to the cloud — allowing you to quickly build device apps. The DMF includes a dashboard module that provides interactive graphical display of data via over 30 tailored widgets.

Read more in Device Manager.

Device Agent Updates

Policy-based Device Updates

For OTA (over-the-air) device updates, the Builder extended its device update capabilities via rule-based policies. This means you can target updates to any subset of your device population and precisely control your update rollout.

Stand-alone Device Updater

While the Ioto agent has a builtin policy-based device update module, many other devices, including those running GoAhead and Appweb web servers can benefit from OTA updates. So we released a stand-alone Device Updater for Appweb, GoAhead users and all other devices.

Read more in Seamless Device Updates.

On-Demand MQTT

MQTT connections consume cloud resources even when idle. This leads to ongoing costs for cloud providers or customers. Maintaining constant MQTT connections for a small number of devices isn’t problematic, but at scale, the costs can add up.

To reduce MQTT costs, Ioto now supports on-demand MQTT connections, allowing the connection to be established when needed, or on a schedule and then be disconnected when idle.

Read more in On-Demand MQTT.

New Hardware and O/S Support

The Ioto device agent is highly portable to new hardware and software environments. We added several new ports including FreeRTOS this year.

The supported O/S list is:

ESP32, FreeBSD, FreeRTOS, Linux, Mac OS X, Quadros, VxWorks

The supported CPUs are:

arm, arm64, mips, mips64, ppc, ppc64, riscv, riscv64, tidsp, sh, x86, x64 and xtensa.

Read more in Supported Hardware and Ioto on the ESP32.

Quick Start Blueprints

In 2024 we added a suite of fully-working device management app samples that are pre-integrated with Ioto. The Ioto management apps are browser-based VueJS apps that communicate with either the local Ioto web server or with the cloud-based Ioto service.

Read more in Ioto Management Apps.

Ioto Cloud Updates

Flexible Cloud Hosting

In 2024, we extended our cloud hosting options so you can choose the hosting option that best fits your needs and budget. You can now configure hosting options from a pre-existing cloud, to hosted for you through to 100% self-hosted. The options are:

Read more in Creating Clouds.

Automated Actions

The core Ioto cloud service has been upgraded and the biggest enhancement is the intelligent Automated Actions facility.

When developing an IoT solution, it’s highly desirable to implement pre-programmed, automatic responses for when your devices or fleet encounter important conditions. Constantly monitoring every aspect of device status around the clock is impractical. By defining automated actions, you can enhance your device fleet’s intelligence, responsiveness, and availability.

Read more in Automated Actions.

Offline Device Commands

Often, devices are offline either intentionally or due to transient network and infrastructure outages. It is important that device commands issued by centralized management are reliably applied regardless of whether a device is offline or online at the time the command is issued.

To address this need, we added the Device Command automation. This reliably stores and distributes device commands to one or more devices. If a device is offline, it will receive and respond to the command when it next connects to the cloud.

We also added presence detection so you can run automated actions when device come online or go offline.

Device Builder Updates

Metrics

The Builder and Ioto cloud services now offer detailed service and per-device metrics for monitoring specific aspects of your devices or fleet.

Device metrics are data measurements pertaining to individual devices or their collective performance. These metrics offer essential insights into the operational and functional aspects of your devices and fleet. For example, you may create a metric representing a device’s internal power supply temperature.

When coupled with the Builder’s dashboard and widgets, you can easily create multiople, intuitive real-time dashboards.

Paper-Cut Issues

The Builder also had countless little updates. We like to focus on “paper-cut” issues—small, minor annoyances that may not seem significant individually but collectively impact user experience. The Builder significantly improved overall usability and consistency by focussing on these issues.

Subscriptions

Not to “bury the lead”, but we reduced our pricing to make the first 10 devices free. This means that individual device makers and commercial builders doing evaluations can fully explore Ioto without charge.

See the Price Calculator and Subscription Plans.

Open Sourced Agents

And just before 2024 closed, in December, we open-sourced the Ioto, Appweb and GoAhead device agents using the GPL license. Individual project makers will love this.

Read Builder Licensing for details.

Summary

2024 was a great year for EmbedThis and our customers. We look forward to partnering with your success in 2025 and beyond.