A Cloud-Based Approach to Development of Embedded Systems Software

The complexity of modern embedded systems and tools to develop them is continuously growing. Although there are various efforts to address this issue (e.g., by raising the level of abstraction) it is rather challenging to keep pace with all relevant innovations in the field. For example, various collaboration and version management tools support the development process when multiple developers collaborate on the development of an embedded solution. In this paper, we present a cloud-based integrated development environment that supports the development of software for embedded systems where the entire tool-chain is in the cloud and provides debugging and flashing of hardware as usual. This approach avoids tool version conflicts, enables central upgrade as well as maintainability and provides a unique interface across multiple operating systems to the developers (the latter is often enforced in industrial settings by restricting the software setup and privileges of an individual developer). Furthermore, the cloud-approach enables ubiquitous access to the development platform.