IOTA cIRI on a BeagleBone Black with Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded

This is my first article for the IOTA community. It’s an introduction of my vision for the meta-iota OpenEmbedded layer, as well as a hands-on tutorial that acts as a proof-of-concept.

Introduction

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. Meanwhile, OpenEmbedded is a build automation framework and cross-compile environment used to create Linux distributions for embedded devices.

Together, these projects provide a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IoT devices, or anywhere a customised Linux OS is needed.

There is an ever-growing movement of adoption of YP/OE tools inside the Embedded Linux community. This is mainly due to the flexibility and modularization they provide in terms of cross-compilation of different applications, customised kernels and Board Support Packages (BSPs). Bringing IOTA into YP/OE will potentially accelerate the adoption of IOTA by the Embedded Linux community since many different boards can now support IOTA tools.