Mongoose OS

an operating system for connected microcontrollers

by Sergey Lyubka

for Dublin IoT & BigData meetup

What is an IoT

• Connecting a computer to a thing
• Grabbing data from a thing and reporting to the Internet
• Controlling a thing via Internet

What a computer could be?

A workstation like this laptop!

• Big
• Eats a lot of power
• Expensive: ~ 1k EUR

A single board computer

• Smaller
• Eats less power
• Cheaper: ~30 EUR

A microcontroller

• Very smal
• Low power
• Very cheap: ~3 EUR

Software development process

• Using a well known OS like Linux
• Many established, polished software frameworks

System requirements

• What is the minimum RAM a Linux system requires?
• What is the disk/RAM usage of a minimal node.js application?
• What is the RAM usage of a single mutual-TLS connection?

Some rough numbers

Node.js (*)

Disk

RAM

11M

7.6M

RPI3

Flash

RAM

(depends)

1G

RAM

50K

TLS connection (*)

ESP8266

• an MCU costs < 1 EUR 
• a dev board costs < 3 EUR
• RAM available to the application: 50k

Forget about prototyping with JS and mutual TLS?

• No
• (demo)

Mongoose OS

• Targets commercial connected products
• License: dual, GPLv2 and commercial
• Provides functionality that is usually required by the commercial product: provisioning, OTA updates, remote management, cloud connectivity, security, Arduino compatibility, etc
• Uses underlying native SDK - for example, ESP-IDF on ESP32
• The environment is C/C++
• A restricted JavaScript engine exists to allow scripting
• JavaScript API calls C API via the FFI

We're hiring!

• talk to me
• or email jobs@cesanta.com

Questions?