Hey there mbed folks.
First time here so I hope I chose the right forum.
Today I’ve received an email from Pelion with the title “Discontinuation of Pelion Device Management Free Trial Program”.
I just got my first board online with Pelion and now I learn that it’ll be gone within a month.
Dear Pelion Device Management or Edge Trial User,
As of February 15, 2022, we will no longer offer a free trial option for the Pelion device management service. We are writing to notify you that your access to the device management and edge free trial service will terminate on this date. We want to thank you for your interest in Pelion. If you have any questions or concerns related to the discontinuation of the
I don’t know, but I think you can find all information in that email
We want to thank you for your interest in Pelion. If you have any questions or concerns related to the discontinuation of the free trial program, please send enquiries to devicequestions@pelion.com.
(Not) good afternoon
Received a similar letter.
The logical question is: what to replace Pelion with?
AWS, Google, Azure, other?
Since this is my hobby, free access is important to me.
For the same reason, an overly complex solution is also not desirable.
I started my study of Pelion with a firmware update, as with a more complex one: NUCLEO-F411RE and Mbed Bootloader in Pelion
Data collection and control was in the plans as my next task.
I would formulate the selection criteria as follows:
Free trial account
Simplicity of technology
Functionality
Ability to deploy a server not in the cloud (as an option).
Ideally find an LWM2M based solution. You can use pelion client with other lwm2m servers.
AWS IoT and Azure IoT Hub are still far behind the curve when it comes to MCU based IoT. You end up having to build a huge amount of the device side features required for IoT by yourself.
And I forgot to indicate the basic wish, I would like to maintain the commitment of Mbed, for many ordinary tasks it is quite enough.
I have no desire to dive into the Cube and HAL, I already had a similar experience 20 years ago at modern MCU at that time.
it depends on how it works. If you want to push updates to the devices and make sure they update because it is critical, quite hard I’d say.
If you just need your devices to ping an url every once in a while and download the update if the version is newer, quite easy. You can host your binaries on github releases and point to that.
My devices have to connect to my servers all the time anyway. So I will just go with 2nd option. I guess we need a customized bootloader and that’s it.
Remote data monitoring and device maintenance are not quite the same thing. If you just need your devices to push sensor data to a server so you can work with them, that’s “quite” easy.
If you want to be able to send data/commands to your devices individually based on their sensor data, that’s a different story.
Do you have access to the devices? If so can you do a wired update? a BLE update?
If not, do you need to push the firmware to all the devices? only a subset? do you need progressive deployment of the updates? → that would be quite hard and Pelion might be the only solution, but if your project really needs this kind of things, paying for Pelion should be part of your cost that you can apply to your product.
On the other hand, if devices can update on their own, they can ping a server to download the update when a newer version is available.
that’s what we do for our project using mcuboot. we are not connected all the time but when we need to update, we tell the device to download the new version x.x.x and mcuboot does the rest.
Hello Ladislas de Toldi
Thanks for bringing up the topic!
As I noted above, this is my hobby.
My main activity is related to large-scale industrial automation, therefore, a hobby nearby is IIoT.
If this or that technology is required for main work, then buying it is not a problem. I think you can imagine the prices at Siemens, Honeywell, ABB.
Mbad + Pelion interested me because of the rather low threshold for entering a new area for me and free access. Unfortunately, wages in my country do not allow me to pay a few hundred dollars/euro/pounds for a hobby.
Now the obvious question is, how to replace Pelion?
Could you please add to your answer in the form below and If there is no free alternative, then information about the price, if possible. I think it will be interesting not only for me!
Data collection and display - Technology X, merits and demerits
Data collection and management - Technology Y, …
Firmware Update - Technology Z, …
It is logical to assume that the entire group of devices of the same type installed in one place requires firmware updates.
As for the device-side update initiative, that doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
Connection to devices via local network with copper or WiFi via the Internet (remote). For industrial applications, in my opinion, other technologies are of little use.
