Internet of Things Course

LAB 8
WiFi Lab
Issue 1.0

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Contents
1 Introduction ............................................................................................ 1
1.1 Lab overview .......................................................................................................................... 1
2 Arm Pelion Device Management ............................................................. 1
2.1 Connecting devices................................................................................................................. 1
2.2 Managing devices ................................................................................................................... 2
2.3 Updating device firmware ...................................................................................................... 3
3 Implementation ...................................................................................... 4
3.1 Setting up the Arm Pelion Platform ....................................................................................... 4
3.2 Setting up board ..................................................................................................................... 4
3.2.1 Setting up WiFi ............................................................................................................... 4
3.2.2 Creating M2M resources ................................................................................................ 5
3.2.3 Adding API key and connect certificate .......................................................................... 5
4 Application Code ..................................................................................... 5
4.1 Program structure .................................................................................................................. 5

Copyright © 2023 Arm Limited (or its affiliates). All rights reserved.
1 Introduction
1.1 Lab overview
In this lab we will learn how to program the DISCO-L475VG-IOT01A board that has an on-board WiFi
module to send and receive sensor data from the Arm Pelion platform. This lab consists of two parts;
the first part includes setting up the board to send sensor values using WiFi and the second part
includes setting up the Arm Pelion platform to view the sensor values from our board.

2 Arm Pelion Device Management

Pelion Device Management is a managed service for interacting and managing your connected
devices. It includes:

• A secure connection, over which we can interact and manage our IoT devices.

• A dashboard that gives summary of our account like devices’ status and usage.

• Access Management for creating API keys to grant access to the device management portal.

• An end-to-end remote firmware update solution, including support for delta updates
suitable for low-bandwidth and mesh-based networks.

• A flexible provisioning mechanism that can work with any factory setup to give our device all
the information it needs to connect to Device Management.

• Web application development using a choice of interfaces: Representational State Transfer

(REST) APIs or online portal.

2.1 Connecting devices

Device management provides a secure connectivity solution between constrained IoT devices and
software or web apps. In this section we will learn some key concepts on how the board is
bootstrapped to the Pelion Device Management services and learn about lightweight machine-to-
machine (LwM2M) protocol to communicate with your board. Following are some key aspects
involved in the connection flow:

• Device ID: It is a unique ID generated by Device Management when the device connects for
the first time. APIs can use this ID to refer to the device.

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 • Endpoint name: The name that is given to our device in the factory. This usually is the same
as the device ID

• Bootstrapping: The device first connects to the bootstrap service, which provides
the LwM2M server account credentials for registration.

• Registration: In this process the device directly connects to the LwM2M server using the
credentials received during bootstrapping.

• Deregistration: A process of deregistering a device from the LwM2M server when it no

longer needs connectivity.

2.2 Managing Devices

Pelion Device Management provides a way to interact with deployed devices. Devices have several
built-in attributes: information that the device provides to Device Management, such as
manufacturer, serial number, and model. Custom attributes allow us to create fine-grained filters.
We can filter devices by both built-in and custom attributes.

• Resources
Resources are sensors and actuators in a device. Device Resource management means, for
example, reading a temperature value or controlling a device-activated door lock. You can
use the Device Management services to manage device resources and execute actions on
the devices. Resource management is based on read, write, create, and execute operations.
All communication to the device is asynchronous and the result of an operation is delivered
as an event through the event notification channel. To ensure the delivery, Device
Management queues the operations and provides protocol agnostic retry logic.
Resource model has a hierarchical data structure representing the device information
using Objects and Resources.
The device application creates and owns the resource structure:
• Object: An Object is a collection of Resources in the device. It is an “interface” to a
temperature sensor, for example.

• Object Instance: An Object can have multiple Instances.

• Resource: Any piece of information from a device is a Resource, which has either
a static value (a value that never changes) or a dynamic value (a value that changes
during the device’s operation). You can read, write to, or execute a Resource’s
information. A Resource can also be an array with multiple values.

Sample Data Structure:

Figure 1 shows an example of data structure with two different objects: a temperature sensor and a
humidity sensor. The temperature sensor Object has five different Resources. We can read their
values, reset their min/max values, and change the unit value. The device has three instances of a
temperature sensor.

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 Figure 1: Sample Data Structure

2.3 Updating device firmware

Device Management Update can be used to send new firmware to deployed devices. To do this, we
need the Device Management Update client running on the device and the Device Management
Update service (Pelion platform) delivering the updates. The process of deploying a firmware update
to devices in the field begins with building a new firmware image and uploading it to the Device
Management servers, where the update service can access it. The Update client, running on the
device, is responsible for verifying, installing, and reporting the progress of firmware updates. We
need to integrate it with your application to enable future updates. We can upload firmware to
Device Management using:
1. The Device Management Portal.
2. The Device Management APIs.

3. The manifest tool update command.

Device Management Update uses certificates to ensure end-to-end security and to validate that a
firmware update originated from a genuine and trusted source. It uses elliptic curve
cryptography (ECC), a type of public key cryptography. In particular, the manifest tool and Device
Management Update use the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. This algorithm uses two
pieces of information:

• A secret, called the private key.

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 • A number, called the public key, which corresponds to the secret.
To sign a document, the holder of the private key first computes a hash of the manifest using
SHA256 and then transforms that hash using the private key. This new number, called
the signature, is appended to the document. Later, anyone with the public key can verify that
the signature matches the document by:
• Computing a hash of the document using SHA256.
• Transforming the signature back into a hash using the public key.

• Comparing the computed hash and the signature hash.

If they are the same, then the verifier can be confident that the signer was in possession of the
private key and therefore can validate the firmware update process.

3 Implementation
3.1 Setting up the Arm Pelion Platform
To use the Arm Pelion Device Management services we just need to sign up using our existing Mbed
account at https://portal.mbedcloud.com/
Once the account is set-up, we can create API keys under Access Management. API keys allow
applications (mobile, web, and so on) to access the Device Management service APIs for a specific
team and its devices. To create a new API key:
1. Click New API key in Access Management > API keys,

2. Give the API key an easily recognizable name.

3. Give access permission to the API key. By default, an API key uses the Developer group’s
access permission. We can associate it with a different group either when creating it or later.

4. Click Create API key.

5. Copy the API key with the Copy to Clipboard button

3.2 Setting up board

In the lab 5 we learnt how to read data from the sensors on-board. In this lab we will send the data
from those sensors to the Arm Pelion platform using WiFi.

3.2.1 Setting up WiFi

Mbed OS boards should have a default configuration for connectivity and storage in the Mbed OS
(targets.json). We can extend or override the default configuration using mbed_app.json in our
application by creating a new entry under the target name for our device where we set our WiFi
credentials.

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We initially set the default network instance,
NetworkInterface::get_default_instance();

Then use connect() function to connect to WiFi.

3.2.2 Creating M2M resources

We need to create resources that will update the sensor values periodically. Below example shows
how to send data to the Pelion device management system:
M2MObjectList m2m_obj_list;
// GET resource 3000/0/5701
m2m_get_res = M2MInterfaceFactory::create_resource(m2m_obj_list, 3000, 0,
5701, M2MResourceInstance::INTEGER, M2MBase::GET_ALLOWED);
cloud_client->add_objects(m2m_obj_list);
m2m_get_res->set_value();

This code snippet binds a resource (any value) with a web path /3000/0/5701. The path can be
specified randomly. Any update of the resource can be pushed to the Pelion platform through M2M
protocols, by calling the function set_value(), and you can view the updates simultaneously on the
portal.

3.2.3 Adding API key and connect certificate

We need to add the API key that we created in the Arm Pelion platform under the Pelion Device
Management section. Next, we will add a connect certificate that will allow our device to securely
connect to Pelion Device Management.

4 Application Code
In this lab exercise we will write a program that reads the temperature and humidity values from the
sensors on-board every 5 seconds. We will then send these values to the Arm Pelion device
management platform.

4.1 Program structure

• Initialization

o Create a DigitalOut object for the LED.

o Initialize variables.

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• Handlers
o Update sensor readings.

o Raise a flag that indicates that the measurements need to be read and displayed again.

• Main function
o Initialize sensors.
o Initialize WiFi.
o Create resources and send values.

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