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Comment by TickleSteve | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that most IoT devices are not running Linux, they're microcontroller-based and this offers no solution for these types of devices.

Also, data-reduction is of prime importance for IoT devices, does Overlock have any tricks to play here?

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From our research, it seems that a lot more of the hardware is running linux than we would've expected [1]. This makes linux a great starting point - but you are right there's other platforms to look at too.

Regarding data use - you're completely right. In previous production IoT projects we've worked on we've had in excess of 10X more debug data than actual useful information coming out, lest we're not able to debug problems! We've got a few tricks up our sleeve, the main one being that this only sends data when there is an exception.

[1]: https://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/iot-developer-t... (Point 4)

In my experience, the Linux-based devices tend to be low-unit-number type devices such as gateways (or prototypes). Also, that point 4 in the link does not have the most common type of embedded OS... i.e. "None". Bare metal is very common. Another point here is that (according to that link), Raspbian is the most common. That indicates the data is coming from the "Maker" community, not the professional embedded developers... we don't tend to use RPi's for much.

Anything that will be remotely cost-sensitive (as anything produced in large numbers will be) will tend to be microcontroller-based.

Like you say, part of the solution is only sending the data that is needed. I would imagine another part of the solution that you could implement is some sort of shared string-table and hence transmitting only event-codes.

We're really targeting gateways at the moment. Obviously, having overlock running on end devices would be ideal, and is certainly a future goal. For the moment though, running on the gateway seems to provide the most utility and is easily acheivable given the proliferation of linux based gateways.

Compression is also certainly on the cards, but really comes in to its own once we have the clients running on resource-constrained devices.

I more or less wondered the same. The site has not a lot of info, but shows a screenshot around a NPE. These won't happen on most embedded IoT devices. Instead they just either crash or are behaving totally weird, thanks to C, No-OS or an RTOS and no memory protection.

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