Rapid Prototyping for Cyber-Physical Systems and IoT Applications with the Tock Embedded Operating System

We will be holding a half-day tutorial at EWSN on the Tock Operating System.

Tock is a secure, multi-programmable embedded operating system. The core kernel is written in Rust, a new type-safe systems language. Developers can dynamically load processes written in any language, which Tock isolates using the memory protection unit (MPU) or equivalent hardware typically available on microcontroller-class devices. Tock is designed and implemented by collaborators at Stanford, University of Virginia, Princeton, and UC San Diego, with additional developers at Chalmers, Google, Western Digital, HP Labs, MIT, NASA Ames, and others in industry.

The goal of the tutorial is to introduce the OS to researchers in the EWSN community, get them started writing applications, and make them familiar with the kernel. The tutorial will provide small hardware kits (further nodes supported by Tock can be purchased online). The emphasis of the tutorial will be for Tock’s potential as a platform for easing, accelerating, and enhancing research and prototyping of IoT and wireless sensor network systems and applications.

Sensor network and IoT research has seen a significant increase in the past few years, as evidenced by the larger number of submissions to EWSN as well as sister venues such as SenSys and CPS-IoT in recent years, as well as pronounced industrial interest in more capable embedded devices. We believe that having a modern, secure OS platform has the potential to help coalesce the community around a set of shared important research problems. We think Tock has the potential to be such an OS/platform and would like to provide a tutorial to help colleagues and fellow researchers in learning to use it.

Please check this page for futher information and updates as we approach the conference!