Building IoT projects with Ubuntu Core talk

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible:

The slides used in the talk can be found here.

The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects. While it might be easy to buy a Raspberry Pi, install Linux and your application, how do you make sure the device remains up to date with security updates? How do you push out updates to your application in a reliable fashion?

I outlined a way of deploy a project using Ubuntu Core, including:

  1. Packaging a simple web server app using the snapcraft tool.
  2. Configuring automatic builds from git, published to the edge channel on the Snap Store. This is also an easy way to get ARM builds for a package, rather than trying to deal with cross compilation tool chains.
  3. Using the ubuntu-image command to create an Ubuntu Core image with the application preinstalled

I gave a demo booting such an image in a virtual machine. This showed the application up and running ready to use. I also demonstrated how promoting a build from the edge channel to stable on the store would make it available to the system wide automatic update mechanism on the device.