Model-driven Development for ESP-based IoT Systems

The large variety of low-end devices and their programming environment increases the development complexity of embedded software for the Internet of Things. Therefore, developing IoT-based systems has been found to be a complex process. As a consequence, the development of these systems becomes more error-prone, time-consuming and costly. ESP (ESP8266 and ESP32) is one of the preferred micro-controllers for education, industrial projects, and prototyping. Arduino, a well-known firmware, is used in ESP which makes it easy-to-use. However, learning the device-specific configurations, using network features, and implementing IoT applications for ESP on the Arduino platform are still burdensome and time-consuming tasks. Raising the abstraction level can help to decrease the complexity and address this problem. To this end, in this paper, a model-driven approach is proposed for the development of Arduino-based programmable ESP micro-controllers. First, a meta-model is designed for the Arduino-based ESP microcontrollers. Based on this meta-model, a Domain-specific Language (DSL) is developed to graphically represent the domain models. To gain more functionality for the language, domain rules are defined as constraints. Also, partial system codes are automatically generated from the instance models. In this way, the development of IoT systems based on ESP modules is supported by code synthesis which increases the performance and reduces the number of errors. Finally, a motion-sensitive thief detector and a servo-motor based room temperature control system are implemented to evaluate the proposed DSL.