Google invites developers to its Brillo IoT platform

What exactly is it? Brillo was described by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an OS to “connect devices in a seamless and intuitive way and make them work better for users”.

According to Google their are three major components: the embedded OS, core services, and a developer kit for building testing and debugging..

Minimum board configurations are described as 128MB of storage and 32MB of RAM. As with the Nexus programme for Android, there will be a number of featured Brillo compatible boards to start with.

One of the first pieces of kit to run on Brillo will be the forthcoming Creator Ci40 dev board, from Imagination Technologies, designed for IoT applications development (which will also run on OpenWrt and Debian, as well as Brillo, note).

Imagination writes:

As part of the Brillo program, the forthcoming Creator Ci41 board from Imagination has been selected by Google as a starter platform for Brillo developers. The Ci41 is a variant of the soon-to-be-released Creator Ci40 board optimized for Brillo support. Starter boards such as the Ci41 are the gold standard for getting started with Brillo development, and will include the reference implementation of Brillo.

Google’s Product Managers Gayathri Rajan and Ryan Cairns write:

Brillo brings the simplicity and speed of software development to hardware by offering you a lightweight embedded OS based on Android, core services, a developer kit, and a developer console. You can choose from a variety of hardware capabilities and customization options, quickly move from prototype to production, and manage at scale with over the air (OTA) updates, metrics, and crash reporting.

Brillo will apparently be Open Source and there will be two update cycles. “It will be updated regularly on two schedules: every six weeks for minor updates and every six months for longer term support.”

Weave

For OEMs wanting to take advantage of Brillo, there is another technology dubbed Weave. This is described as a messaging service that enables phones and devices to talk to each other locally and remotely through the cloud.

Google says it will be easy to get a device on the network with a “secure and consistent setup experience”, the units will be capable of being controlled by mobile devices or desktops, including analytics support. There will also be crash reporting and over the air updates.

The idea is that it will provide a common language for use across a range of hardware, supporting device discovery, provisioning, authentication and interaction.

Google describes it:

The Weave cloud server handles remote communication and access to your web-connected device, safely and at scale. With Weave you also get a set of services to securely set up the device and provide controlled access. Additionally, Weave works seamlessly with, and is actually built right into, Brillo; but, you can also use Weave libraries with your existing Linux-based OS.

There will also be a “Weave compatibility program” for shipping certified Weave-branded devices, as well as a hardware program for silicon vendors to build and sell Brillo-compliant hardware.

Note that Weave comes with a mobile SDK for both iOS and Android.

The Brillo Developer Kit (BDK) is based on the Android.mk build architecture, and runs on Ubuntu 14.04. It will support the Android debug bridge tool (adb), for testing and inspecting target devices.

A developer invitation can be found at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/brilloweaveinviteform/

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