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Blog posts tagged "Ubuntu Core"

Speed up your ROS snap builds

A while back I wrote a post about distributing a ROS system among multiple snaps. If you want to enable some sort of add-on story, you need to have multiple snaps, and that remains the way to do it today with ROS. That approach works, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not

AWS IoT Greengrass released as a snap

Canonical and AWS are excited to announce the public release of AWS IoT Greengrass as a snap. AWS IoT Greengrass is software that brings local compute, messaging, data caching, sync, and ML inference capabilities to your IoT device. IoT and embedded developers can now easily install and get started with IoT Greengrass in seconds on

Snapcraft Summit Montreal

Following previous events in New York, Seattle, and London, the fourth Snapcraft Summit is taking place in Montreal, Canada from June 11th to 13th 2019. We have partnered with Travis CI this time and also expanded the scope of the event to three tracks. Snapcraft Summit Snapcraft is the universal app store for Linux that

The path to Ubuntu Core

At Canonical, helping customers overcome their challenges is what we do every day. In the IoT world, a common challenge we encounter is customers who are interested in transitioning to Ubuntu Core and the snapcraft.io ecosystem, but are unsure how to begin. This post covers the recommended approach. In most cases, it’s relatively easy for

Porting Ubuntu Core 18 on Nvidia Jetson TX1 Developer Kit

Ubuntu Core (UC) is Canonical’s take in the IoT space. There are pre-built images for officially supported devices, like Raspberry Pi or Intel NUCs, but for other boards, when there is no community port, one needs to create one on their own. This is the the case if one wants to run Ubuntu Core 18

Building ROS 2 snaps with Colcon

The snapcraft CLI has supported building ROS1 snaps for a while via the catkin plugin. We supported the ROS2 betas via the ament plugin, but that was before Open Robotics had a ROS2 package repository setup, which meant that the ament plugin built the ROS2 underlay from source, and it was predictably dreadfully slow. However,

Single-Node Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi with MicroK8s and Ubuntu

Introduction The goal of this blog post is to explain how to setup and run Ubuntu Server on a Raspberry Pi with MicroK8s on-top to provide a single-node Kubernetes host for development and testing. In the last few months Ubuntu Server 18.04 has been ported to run the Raspberry Pi 2/3 which means we can

Securing IoT device data against physical access

Security remains the number one concern when designing and deploying IoT devices. High profile breaches continue to occur and concerns cease to subside. For any organisation, security needs to be front of mind and considered from the start – not as an afterthought. Having no mechanism in which to address security concerns can be as

How selecting the right Linux OS expedites IoT time to market

With a proliferation of related hardware, software and solutions being rushed out to capture the promise of a multi-billion dollar IoT industry, vendors are under pressure to decrease their development time and speed up their time to market. Choices such as selecting the right infrastructure from the outset become even more important duri

Easy IoT with Ubuntu Core and Raspberry Pi

My current job involves me mostly working in the upper layers of the desktop software stack however I started out working in what was then called embedded engineering but now would probably be know as the Internet of Things (IoT). I worked on a number of projects which normally involved taking some industrial equipment (radio

The forecast is robots

Robots are an increasingly important part of our lives, in more ways than we realise. I’m not talking just about Roombas, or the toy robots that inhabit the wish lists of the world’s children (and the young at heart). Robots are increasingly behind the scenes, powering the modern world we experience daily. From clothing to

Where eagles snap – A closer look

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about snap security, taking a journey through the eyes of a developer and handing over to a user who wants to install applications from the Snap Store. We discussed concepts like application confinement, interfaces, store review, and automatic updates. Today, we will look under the hood, and examine

Ubuntu Core 18 released for secure, reliable IoT devices

Canonical today published Ubuntu Core 18, bringing the popular Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to high-security embedded devices. “Dell has been working closely with Canonical over the past three years to certify Ubuntu Core on all our Edge Gateway platforms. Ubuntu Core enables our customers to build highly secure, stable IoT solutions that deliver the

Ubuntu Core Smart Speaker

With the holidays coming up, many of us can expect to spend time with our friends and families, often listening to seasonal music, or indeed escaping the seasonal music! Whether you’re joining in or getting away from the crowd, this simple project can help. This is part one of a series of posts where I

Ubuntu Core and Kura: A framework for IoT gateways

The Linux distribution model, whilst established and well understood for computing, has some limitations when it comes to IoT edge gateway devices. Due to often being located in remote or hard to access areas, there is a greater demand for a system that offers both high levels of robustness and security. With the IoT gateway

Fing: future-proofing Fingbox the IoT home network monitoring device

As many as 20.4 billion internet of things devices are estimated to be in use by 2020, according to Gartner, with consumer products making up 63% of this figure. A large amount of these will be low-cost devices, rushed out by manufacturers in order to capitalise on this opportunity. Unfortunately, this method typically pays no