Last week we organized a Q&A session live to answer your questions concerning Luos or anything related to embedded systems. This Livestream was held on October 11th, 2022
If you were not able to attend or if you want to go back to the information that was discussed during the Livestream this blog post is a resume of everything.
If you have other questions concerning Luos, our open-source project, or the embedded world, feel free to join our Discord community. We are a +6000 member community as of right now and keep in touch with our members daily to create a strong community and an inspiring place for everyone.
Where did the idea of creating Luos come from?
When I started working in the industry 15 years ago, I was working in Paris, in a company called Aldebaran Robotics which was developing humanoid robots.
It was around this time that I discovered ways to create extremely complex products with a lot of electronic boards on them. I noticed that when you have to change something somewhere on the device, you have to rethink absolutely everything from scratch every time. However, I really disliked always doing the same thing as an embedded system developer. As consequence, I created an association in Paris with multiple engineers facing the same kind of issues when we were working on a new device. We started to work on technologies that included certain methodologies allowing us to improve usability in the embedded world.
A few years later I was spotted by Inria which is the biggest Research Institute in France regarding software. I worked there for a little bit more than two years on my first open-source project. This project was an open-source humanoid robot which was called poppy project.
This project was very big with a lot of people from all over the world working on it. My role was to create a piece of technology allowing anyone to develop any kind of piece of hardware to make those different pieces of hardware compatible with each other. In retrospect, that was the basis of Luos at this time.
I then created my first company Pollen Robotics which still exists today.
Its goal is to create robots for big corporations, with the specialty to be able to create the first prototype of a robot in only one day. This was because we had the idea of having a very modular technology allowing us to just consider any piece of hardware as like Lego bricks making it possible to create the robot by adding those different bricks together. And three years later at Pollen, multiple customers started asking us about the modular technology we were using, but not just to build a robot.
Following this, we split the company into two parts and created Luos. Pollen Robotics still exists and is a great company. They are developing an open-source, real-size robot called Reachy. If you are interested in this topic, make sure to visit their website to find out more. But I’m not alone in this, I founded the company together with Simon and Emanuel. Today we have a complete team of developers working on this technology.
Why should I use Luos in embedded development when you want the least overhead possible as resources are limited?
The main goal of Luos is to run on extremely complex products with multiple boards on them. This describes the real benefit of Luos, because when you have multiple electric boards running, multiple kinds of programs are used which will allow you to synchronize the different programs running on the different boards.
When you are working on these kinds of products, you will need to exchange information between your different nodes. You should be able to use existing physical support to communicate. You should then proceed to develop something that can receive this information allowing you to work on it.
In short, we develop everything to be extremely low cost in terms of memory, for example on the flash, or on the RAM, and in the CPU.
We spent years to improve the efficiency of this code but we know that it is difficult to do the same when you are working on personal projects or even on a professional project because you will have a lot of other things to deal with.
Basically, if you want to work with Luos it will be lighter than your own solution. But it depends, of course. If you have a really simple communication to do, Luos will be a lot bigger, but we provide everything allowing you to adjust Luos and to choose the space you need. If you just want to know what the minimal requirements are to build a simple product, you will need about 30 kilobytes of flash and approximately 2 KB of RAM. And after that the CPU consumption with rely a lot on how many messages you want to send.
How do you start with Arduino or Raspberry Pi
First up we must mention that there are two big differences between the two. Arduino is a small microcontroller without any operating system on it. Raspberry Pi on the other hand is a kind of small computer that you can easily embed, so it works almost like a Linux Computer. It is very different for Arduino because when you develop something, you will have to compile it on your computer, then copy past the binary generated by the compiler directly into the memory of your Arduino.
After this, you will execute your code without having any threading or advanced file systems. Since it is so different, it depends a lot on what you want to do. If you want to control a simple motor, Arduino will be better because it is more real-time responsive than Raspberry Pi and it doesn’t have any operating systems. Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, is a lot more powerful, you can scale everything in milliseconds of time regularity.
What can you tell us concerning Arduino and Raspberry Pi in terms of industrialization?
If you want to industrialize something, both of the solutions are difficult. You will need to acquire a specific board to work with both, which is not interesting when you go through the process of industrialization. Recently Raspberry Pi released specific microcontrollers for this which can work on a lot of industrial cases. There are a lot of limitations when you are using audio especially if you don't have access to the resources available on your microcontroller, which is limiting. I advise you not to use Arduino because it comes with multiple limitations, especially in terms of access to resources on your microcontroller.
If you had the chance to learn embedded systems again, how and what would you do to increase your skills?
Let’s go back to my experience, when I started studying embedded systems there was no Arduino so the start was a lot more complex. Today it is extremely easy to start learning embedded systems as there are tons of cheap boards (like Arduino) and a vast number of tutorials online.
But that’s not everything, in my opinion in order to become a good embedded system engineer, you should constantly work on personal projects involving embedded systems like robots. You could also create an association with other students. That’s exactly what I did and it taught me everything that I know today.
What boards does Luos work with?
In theory, you can make Luos work with any kind of board, but we have some boards that are already available on which you don't have to write one line of code to make it work. Basically, you can make Luos work on your board by creating your own hardware abstraction; this indicates Luos how to access the physical peripherals of your microcontrollers to, for example, send messages, received messages, or detect user nodes. If you however don’t want to create your own HAL, you can also use the one we already provide which covers Arduino and most of the STM32 and ESP32.
What are the plan for Luos in the future?
We have recently been working on a roadmap allowing people that are using Luos to understand what we are going to do in the future.
I will talk about the different features we plan to release. Right now, we are working on the 1.7 release which will have some improvements in the speed of the uploading of the bootloader. Perhaps you’ve already seen the video of Viktoria, she worked on a feature that multiplies the speed of the bootloader which allows you to update on the device very fast.
Apart from that, we are working on native support, which gives you the possibility to compile Luos on your computer and test lines of code natively on your computer without needing to plug in any additional boards.
But let me talk to you about certain technologies that we are working on in the future. We’ve recently started to plan to work on Luos engine V3.
The main goal is to simplify the addition of a specific network. Right now, Luos mostly supports a network called Robus, which is a communication protocol specifically designed for Luos. In the future however we want to be able to comply with any kind of industrial network.
We will also work on something called Multi-phy.
This feature is extremely interesting because it completely breaks the fraction between the embedded world and the normal software computer development. The multiple-phy is like a switch allowing Luos to route information on multiple physical transportation layers. This will allow you to have one board that supports WiFi and another one that only supports CAN. This Wifi interface will be shared with all the other one. Luos will be able to route information from CAN to Wifi, allowing you to access the services on the application anywhere on the complete product, even if you have multiple networks between these software.
We also plan to enable Luos compilation using web assembly. This will allow the creation of Luos pieces of code on services running directly into any kind of web browser, this is extremely useful when you are working on cloud applications. You will be able to provide a service that will be natively compatible with an electronic device without having to install anything on the computer side.
We are also starting to work on SAAS tools to increase the speed of the development using Luos. There is already a proof of concept available on our website if you are interested; part four of the tutorial get started uses this tool. Those tools will provide a registry that will allow you to store the services you develop with Luos and share them with the other users of this technology.
Inspector is a tool to see what’s happening inside a product; it's like a debug interface allowing you to log any events anywhere on your complete product at a nano second scale, and it allows you to just understand what's happening on the product.
The last one is called Luos manager which is dedicated to companies that are working on developing hardware products. This will give them a way to deal with the developments; for example, track the bugs during the development and the postproduction of the product.
What options do we have for integrating security on SoC?
There are a lot of different solutions to integrate security on SoC, but we will probably not implement this with Luos because the security regarding Luos mostly depends on the network you will use on your device. For example, if you are using a Wi-Fi network interface, you will have specific security to develop or install to have secure communications between your different pieces of software on Luos. This means that depending on the physical support we have different kinds of securities. The idea of this Luos certification is to provide some high level rules allowing you to filter specific messages.
Right now, we don't work on any kind of SoC security, but perhaps this is something that could be put into place when Luos is used by the entire world.
If I want to contribute to Luos, how can I do that?
We have a whole page dedicated to this, if you go to GitHub you can contribute directly to Luos. We work with flags, so there are certain flags dedicated to a call for contributions.
We also have flags for easy-to-do contributions and some more advanced contributions for advanced developers, you can directly have a look at them.
We also have a page on our documentation that explains the process more in detail. Contribute to Luos. If you have any questions about it, or any idea about how to contribute to Luos, feel free to join us on discord and directly ask us on the server.
We have recently had a big growth on our Discord server which we are really proud of, so thanks to all of you.
That is all for this Q&A session!
We will continue to write this kind of transcription to propose all the answers you need to start using Luos. Follow us on Linkedin or Discord to subscribe to the upcoming Q&A session.
If you would like to see or review the Q&A video, here is the recording:
Get started with Luos