I have researched to develop an affordable remote IoT laboratory. The mechanism is like this.
We deploy several sensor nodes with different sources of sense at the lab that can be used by students for practical work.
Students select which sensor will be used for practice.
Students write a program/firmware for the sensor works.
Students update the firmware over the air.
Students monitor/watch the program’s functionality on the dashboard.
For steps 1-3 and 5, In my opinion, the openremote is suitable (perhaps with adjustment). However, I did not find how openremote handles the mechanism to update firmware remotely (via OTA, over the air). Are there any documents for this purpose (may be I missed such information)?
Actually not, because of the several numbers of microcontrollers out there.
Are you trying to use ESP‘s in future?
I‘m actually developing an OTA Feature for openremote. But it‘s still far away in my todo-list.
Thank you for the response, Denis.
Yes, I have developed such sensor nodes using ESP32. Previously, I tried using Thingsboard, but there is a problem with using OTA in the free Thingsboard version. So, now the IoT lab project is no progress due to such a problem. I still prefer to use open-source IoT platforms to have easiness of future development.
Hopefully, your plan to provide the OTA feature in openremote will be available soon.
We have implemented OTA support for customers by adding Hawkbit, assets/devices auto provision into OpenRemote and then get auto provisioned inside Hawkbit.
The device firmware then needs to periodically call HTTPS endpoints in Hawkbit to check if there is a new firmware version for them.
due to such a problem. I still prefer to use open-source IoT platforms to have easiness of future development.