Maker and educator Mukesh Sankhla has designed an Espressif ESP32-powered system that may get legacy industrial {hardware} speaking to the Web of Issues (IoT) over their current serial buses, protected by Thistle Applied sciences’ safety platform: the Retro-Logger.
“Right here is the factor: these previous machines nonetheless work,” Sankhla explains of the {hardware} focused by the Retro-Logger. “They’re exact, dependable, and battle-tested. However changing them is pricey and disruptive. So… why not make the previous good as a substitute of changing it? Retro-Logger is a modern-day answer for a late-Twentieth-century drawback: how you can get decades-old industrial machines to speak to the cloud. It’s a safe, ESP32-based IoT knowledge logger that faucets into UART serial ports, customary on most legacy gear, to learn knowledge and add it to the cloud in real-time.”
The guts of the Retro-Logger is a DFRobot FireBeetle ESP32-E improvement board, constructed round an Espressif ESP-WROOM-32E microcontroller with two Tensilica Xtensa LX6 processor cores operating at as much as 240MHz, 520kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 4MB of flash storage plus single-band Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.2 with Bluetooth Low Vitality (BLE) radios. Elsewhere within the 3D-printed housing are 4 standing LEDs and a spring-loaded terminal for serial connectivity.
Getting previous industrial {hardware} to speak to the IoT, then, may very well be so simple as wiring the Retro-Logger as much as its serial port and having it transmit to a distant database — however Sankhla’s design contains the all-to-often forgotten “S” in “IoT”: safety. The Retro-Logger contains Safe Boot capabilities, powered by Thistle’s safety platform. “With Safe Boot enabled,” Sankhla explains, “nobody can reprogram the system with out correct authorization. Unauthorized or malicious firmware is mechanically blocked, stopping potential safety breaches. Solely correctly signed and authenticated firmware can be accepted by the system.”
The undertaking is documented in full right here on Hackster.io; extra info on the Safe Boot system is obtainable on the Thistle web site.
