Introduction to OTAdrive

OTAdrive is designed to upgrade, configure, and protect IoT devices. It provide several services:

  • Define multiple products and grouping devices
  • Firmware Upgrade (OTA update)
  • Device Configuration
  • Device Resource File Manager
  • Anti-Clone Mechanism

ota-update-cycle

Products Organization

OTAdrive uses the following organization to manage your products and devices.

ota-device-group-organization

Each OTAdrive user can define multiple products. Each product should have at least one 'device group' (Default Group) and each group contains an unlimited count of devices with the same firmware and configuration.

Firmware Upgrade Service

Firmware upgrade service (known as OTA update mostly) is a service let you upgrade your IoT device's firmware without any cable or special tool (like programmer etc.). OTAdrive provides an API (URL) to your IoT devices and lets you show different firmware files to specific devices. With this feature, you can change and rollback a group of your devices. It lets you upgrade devices with fewer bug risk.

Device Configuration Service

You can't find any IoT device which doesn't need to configure for operations. There are many cases you should configure your device to work. The simplest example is WiFi credentials or IP configuration of the network, sometimes you need to set up IoT server address, etc. OTAdrive configuration service provides a simple json object as configuration. You don't have to recompile and update your firmware to just change a parameter for your customer. For example in our LED blinker project, we shouldn't recompile our firmware just to change the blinking speed. Blinking speed could be a configurable parameter and we can just fetch new parameters from OTAdrive.

Device Resource File Manager

In the IoT world, all devices such as ESP8266, ESP32, RaspberryPi, etc. have local file storage to store some files like images, voices, Html, CSS. Mostly these files are useful in the user interface. If you want to change these files you have to change them manually or you have to recompile your firmware and it won't be easy at all. OTAdrive resource manager service is here. It lets you make changes in your IoT device's local files easily. Create a resource pack of files and folders in the OTAdrive panel and choose it for a specific group of devices.

Anti-Clone Mechanism

When you are using ESP8266, ESP32, RaspberryPi, or any other IoT devices with an external flash chip, You will face clone risk on your product. You spend a lot of time and money to produce your product and someone could clone it without any pain. Specially cloning of ESP8266 and ESP32 is easier than others. You can find many ways on google. To avoid your product clone we provide a solution that makes it very hard to clone. You can choose your very own security stamp on the OTAdrive panel and your devices won't start to operate until this security stamp matches their MAC and serial number.