Deprecations coming – oh my!
Lots of changes in the world today. In the software world, you will frequently see the dreaded announcement:
Important changes (deprecations) coming
With open source, you have the choice of moving to a newer library or freezing your implementation on the working code that you’ve been using for years.
Industrial Internet of Things solutions require factory installations that in many cases will last much longer than the API or As-A-Service du jour. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others have promoted, developed and deprecated numerous APIs and services. The strategy seems to be throw it against the wall and see what sticks and “Can we make money on this?”. Progress is great, but sometimes, these solutions turn out to be fads. Sometimes it is better to be on the trailing edge instead of the leading/bleeding edge of technologies.
That being said, software is easy and fast (mostly) to change. Hardware can last for a long time. For PaGoI, we’ve used popular open source or widely available software and hardware designs that will be supported and available for at least a few years (RPi just turned 8 years old (introduced in 2012). The Espressif Systems products (ESP8266 – 2014 and ESP32 – 2016) are supported by a number of Arduino and other development frameworks (IDF, Free-RTOS). The Arduino framework goes back to 2005. So, the hardware and software we’ve chosen to develop our solutions have a good chance of being around for quite awhile. And there is a community of developers who know how to develop using these software/hardware platforms.
Widely available hardware has also meant very inexpensive prices for the computing component. Espressif Systems, in 2016, declared that they wanted to be the platform for IoT and they projected 26 billion devices by 2022. They wanted to have a large segment of that market. Today, the ESP8266 and ESP32 chips are less than $2 even in small quantities. The chips have been integrated into many development boards which often are near complete solutions for low volume applications. The chips are are very capable computing platforms with 32 bit processing, 40-240Mhz clock rates, 4-16Mbytes of RAM and support WiFi and Bluetooth. They are also come with ample I/O for monitoring (controlling) and interfacing with the factory environment (including legacy devices). The ESP32 even has a low energy co-processor for very extended battery life where powered connections are not feasible or economical.
Deprecation is coming, but by being on the long trailing edge of the tail and it is possible to have control and stability of your hardware and evolve the software as needed.