Ticos Linux SDK

Ship hardware products at the speed of software. With Ticos, you can continuously monitor devices, debug firmware issues, and deploy OTA updates to your fleet.

Overview

The Ticos Linux SDK consists of a combination of existing open-source software and a daemon ticosd that orchestrates and configures it. It also implements additional features such as tracking of reboot reason tracking, and in the future reporting crashes and logs.

Dotted lines represent runtime configuration, and solid lines represent flow of data. Faded-out elements represent upcoming features.

To provide core Ticos platform features, the Ticos Linux SDK relies on well-established, battle-tested open-source software. The daemon ticosd implements Ticos-specific features and also acts as a configuration agent.

Prerequisites

Even though support for a broader diversity of setups is planned, this first versions of our SDK makes the following assumptions:

• Your project uses Yocto as a build system.
• It uses systemd as an init system.
• It uses SWUpdate for OTA (optional if you don't plan to integrate with OTA).

If your project diverges from these assumptions, please get in touch. It will likely still work without major changes.

Getting Started

Take a look at our getting-started guide to set up your integration.

OTA/Release Management is currently fully supported through an off-the-shelf integration with the SWUpdate agent. Read more about it in the OTA integration guide.

Metrics are also supported through collectd. Read more about it in the Linux Metrics integration guide.

Documentation and Features

• Detailed documentation for the Ticos Linux SDK can be found in our online docs: see the introduction and the getting-started guide.
• Visit our features overview for a generic introduction to all the major features of the Ticos platform.

An integration example can be found under /meta-ticos-example. The central part of the SDK lives in a Yocto layer in /meta-ticos.

OTA Updates

To provide OTA Updates, the Ticos Cloud implements an API endpoint compatible with the hawkBit DDI API. Various clients are available, but ticosd supports SWUpdate out of the box and is able to configure it to talk to our hawkBit DDI-compatible endpoint.

Read more about Linux OTA management using Ticos.

Metrics

The Ticos Linux SDK relies on collectd for the collection and transmission of metrics. Application metrics can be sent to collectd by means of statsd.

Read more about Linux metrics using Ticos.

Crash Reports

To collect and upload user-land coredumps, the Ticos Linux SDK relies the standard kernel coredump feature, and so does not need to make use of any additional dependencies. Read more about coredumps using the Ticos Linux SDK.

Reboot Reason Tracking and Logs

These features are fully in the domain of ticosd. Note that logs are an upcoming feature, while reboot reason tracking and crash reports are supported today. Read more about reboot reason tracking using the Ticos Linux SDK.