Device Management

[ledbelly]

I am new to the forum, I did a quick search for device management but came up empty.

Is there any way to manage devices in scale with OTA updates?

Hand crafting and updating firmware one at a time works in limited capacity, how can these be managed remotely?

Thanks

[ledbelly]

I found it, good discussion.
https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/pi-gateway/is-anyone-doing-over-the-air-updates-via-a-raspberry-pi-gateway/

[Felix]

OTA (wireless) firmware updates is a 1:1 approach.
You could write some code that queues the process for multiple nodes.
Not sure if anyone else has tried something like that already.

[perky]

I would imagine pushing an OTA to multiple nodes simultaneously is a bit tricky as there could be packet errors requiring retries and you might not know which ones it happened to as they can't all respond at the same time. It's possible I guess with some higher level protocol on both ends but is it worth the faff?
Mark.

[joelucid]

I think there are scenarios where this would be important. Imagine 1000's of nodes, e.g. controlling lights in a vast shopping center. Every node runs the same firmware so really no point in updating each one individually.

You could do updates by broadcast to update multiple nodes at once. Of course you'd have to be highly redundant so every node likely sees each packet at least once. And you'd want a final opportunity for each node to request any missing packets.

I think it would be seriously cool to update 20000 nodes in 15 seconds using a 4x redundant protocol at 200kbit.

[ledbelly]

I can think of many scenarios where there would be thousands of devices needing firmware updates. In that case, scaleable device management with resilient updating would also be a requirement. By resilient I mean that if the firmware update failed, it could default to the last known good firmware. And scaleable to connect over a thousand devices per gateway.

Could the Moteino scale to thousands of devices per gateway with one of the 900MHz transceivers?

We are using an off the shelf 2.4 GHz raido/microcontroller with a cloud service. It has the device management features we need (for a fee) but the power consumption is killing us. We need something to last 12-18 months, not 2 months. There are so few 'scaleable' solutions with low power.

[joelucid]

Could the Moteino scale to thousands of devices per gateway with one of the 900MHz transceivers?

The RFM69 library is limited to 255 nodes since it uses one byte addressing. But that can easily be changed since its just a software limitation.

Other than that it's just a question of how much traffic needs to be sent. Say you have 20000 nodes and each packet exchange takes 20ms. If you update every node that comes out to a total "on-air" time of 400 seconds. Of course if you're not synchronized you'll get collisions which will worsen the picture. But add an clock crystal to each node and coordinate when each node sends and you might be able to have them send an update once every 10 minutes (600 seconds - some overhead).

Of course at that point you'd basically have saturated your band. Send at higher bitrates and much more would be possible.

Joe