Google Releases Cloud IoT Device SDK for Microcontrollers

Google has announced the release of its Cloud IoT Device SDK, which was developed in partnership with a few tech giants, including Arm, NXP, Microchip, Nordic, and Espressif Systems. If it sounds like the SDK was designed for microcontrollers, you’re not wrong, as Google states the platform is “for customers designing, building, or deploying IoT solutions, the SDK supports a wider array of MCU-class devices, opening up the opportunity to build systems for asset tracking, smart agriculture, and energy metering.”

The Cloud IoT Device SDK will gives engineers the ability to rapidly prototype, profile, and test their IoT devices using the Cloud IoT Core service. It also allows users to manage all of their devices under one roof, and establish data streams with analytic tools, including BigQuery and Bigtable, among a host of others. Google provides client libraries for the SDK written in Embedded C, enabling a secure connection of low-end IoT devices to the Cloud IoT core. Google notes that their kit targets energy and size-constrained applications — such as battery-powered trackers, and Wi-Fi smart home devices with limited ROM.

The SDK also lets developers building embedded systems to port their devices over to a wide array of 32-bit microcontrollers and real-time operating systems, such as Zephyr, Arm Mbed OS, FreeRTOS kernel, with more coming down the pipeline.

A few key features provided in the SDK:

• A highly portable feature set paired with a lightweight BSP (Board Support Package) allowing for the deployment of new features with minimal engineering impact.

• Single-threaded operations with co-routines to support bi-directional messaging without interrupting device applications.

• All the necessary security requirements to connect to IoT Core via JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication, out-of-the-box integration with third-party TLS stacks (wolfSSL, mbedTLS), including TLS 1.2 and support for various secure elements.

Google’s Cloud IoT Device SDK for Embedded C has been made available on GitHub, which supports current Pub/Sub traffic on a non-blocking socket implementation that runs on POSIX, RTOS, and no-OS devices.