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Eclipse ThreadX: Charting our course for 2025

On November 21, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was contributing Azure RTOS to the Eclipse Foundation, which gave birth to the Eclipse ThreadX project . Since then, the project team and Eclipse Foundation staff have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition ThreadX to a true community-driven open source project and ensure its continued certification for safety-critical applications. In this short post, I will review the major milestones of that first year and share what to expect from the team in 2025. ThreadX v6.4.1 On February 28, 2024, the ThreadX project released version 6.4.1 of ThreadX and its companion modules. This release, the first made under the Eclipse Foundation development process, completed the transition of ThreadX to open source. From a technical standpoint, there were no changes from the prior 6.4.0 release. And yet, v6.4.1 represents a significant milestone. The Eclipse Foundation intends to certify ThreadX v6.4.1 for safety-critical applications. Yo...
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A Few Embedded and IoT Sessions Worth Your Time at OCX 2024

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the Eclipse Foundation . It also represents a brand-new start for our annual flagship conference. Its new name, Open Community Experience (OCX), emphasises our community's place in the broader open source ecosystem. The event will take place in Mainz, Germany, on October 22-24, 2024. OCX, as EclipseCon before, features several distinct tracks. One of them is dedicated to Embedded, IoT, and Edge Computing topics. If you look at the conference’s agenda , you will find them by activating the “OCX Tracks” filter. Click this link to access a pre-filtered version of the agenda. Not sure about which sessions to catch? See below the top five sessions I hope to attend. Of course, there are many other great ones, so please browse the full agenda. * How IoT can save a life - A real-world example October 23, 2024 11:30 AM-12:15 PM CET I love talks that showcase concretely how technology can make the world better. IoT devices, after all, embed software in ev...
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Three Embedded and Iot Topics I Expect to See at Open Community Experience 2024

As the Eclipse Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary, its annual developer conference is reborn under a new name: Open Community Experience (OCX). With the new name come a new city (Mainz, Germany), and a fresh new concept for the event. One thing that does not change is the focus on the various developer communities that make the broader Eclipse ecosystem. Naturally, Java and Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) will have a prominent place. That’s why they get their own co-located events in Open Community for Java and Open Community for Automotive . But the organisers remembered the embedded and IoT community. We are getting our own track inside the main OCX event! Here are three Embedded and IoT topics I expect (and hope) will take a lot of place in the track’s program: 1. Sparkplug and the Unified Namespace (UNS) Since it became an international standard in 2023, Sparkplug continued to advance. Our recent white paper on the business value of Sparkplug shows how this Eclipse open ...
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Sparkplug: From Specification to Standard

This week, the Eclipse Foundation announced that the Sparkpug® 3.0 specification has been published as an International Standard. That sounds impressive. But what does it mean, exactly? And how will this impact the evolution of Sparkplug? To answer this question, let’s take a step back and consider what standards are. The technology industry loves standards. For example, USB is a set of standards managed by the USB Implementers Forum, Inc. (USB-IF), a non-profit corporation founded by the companies that developed the USB specification. The Eclipse Foundation describes Jakarta EE as a standard: a set of  specifications for enterprise Java application development. In the IoT and Industrial Automation world, OASIS Open also presents the MQTT protocol as a standard. However, standards play a much more pervasive role in society. There are standards for building homes and others that define how cars should work. Standards permeate our lives. To understand the significance of this ...
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Sparkplug Recognized a Leader of Edge Computing

I am delighted today to announce that Sparkplug won an IoT Edge Computing Excellence Award from IoT Evolution ! This achievement underscores the growing maturity of the specification and its relevance to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Congratulations to the committers and contributors of the Sparkplug specification project! From the announcement:  This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space. Companies selected for this award have proven that their products are enabling advanced IoT deployments by offering edge solutions that bring real-time computing, data availability, analytics, AI and machine learning to edge devices. Edge Nodes play a fundamental role in Sparkplug. Version 3.0 of the specification defines them as any MQTT Client application that manages an MQTT Session and provides the physical or logical gateway functions required to participate in the Sparkplug topic namespace and leverage its payload definit...
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Two Easy Things You Can Do to Support the Open Source IoT and Edge Community

Most of what we do at the Eclipse Foundation happens in public. Our mailing lists and code repositories are open to all. Anyone can freely download, modify, and redistribute our code and slide decks with little to no strings attached. This kind of openness is the mark of truly successful ecosystems. However, one persistent problem for our open source committers and contributors is the lack of information about who uses the code they write and for what purpose. This lack of information is a significant disadvantage from a product and project management perspective. It is easier to prioritize new features or bug fixes when you know who uses your code and for what purpose. Moreover, our committers and contributors are keen to engage with their user community to discuss their roadmap and solicit feedback. While this is a persistent and hard-to-solve problem, there are two easy things you can do to help. Both will require only a few minutes of your time. The first is to show your support fo...
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Eclipse Amlen v1.0: A Milestone in the Growth of MQTT

Over ten years ago, the Eclipse Foundation launched the Eclipse IoT working group . MQTT was one of the pillars of that launch. The first three projects were Eclipse Paho , a collection of MQTT clients, Eclipse Mosquitto , an MQTT broker, and Eclipse Kura , a Java/OSGi solution for IoT gateways that supports the protocol. To say that MQTT is in our genes would be an understatement. Since then, usage of MQTT has grown significantly. Year after year, the simple yet powerful publish/subscribe protocol is the most widely used IoT-specific protocol in our annual developer surveys . For example, in the 2021 edition, 44% of respondents stated they are using it. We like to think we are at least partly responsible for that. By the way, our 2022 survey is currently underway; you have until June 15, 2022, to participate. Click here to share your insights after finishing this post, of course. IBM has been a key player in our MQTT ecosystem for a long time. In 2021, the company brought its commit...
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