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John Donovan

Simplicity and complexity may be logical opposites, but customers expect the most complex, feature-rich applications to be simple and intuitive to use. Slick user interfaces are the norm in consumer devices, but commercial and industrial control systems are starting to catch up. With the Internet of Things (IoT) promising to be the Next Big Thing (NBT), design engineers need some way to overlay their complex designs with an intuitive user interface. Renesas and BugLabs have just made that a lot easier.

BugLabs provides two services to enable easy M2M communications. Dweet provides, in their words, “ridiculously simple data sharing for the internet of things. Fast, free, and easy to use, it’s like Twitter for social machines.” Dweet.io is a publisher and subscriber service to which devices connect to share data. The first graphic shows dweet.io capturing the data in real time from an Internet-connected Renesas RL78/G14 RDK. While nicely structured, this isn’t a format that’s useful for a control engineer.

Freeboard.io is another BugLabs offering, this one providing a dashboard of customizable widgets that enable you to easily visualize and control a remote device. The new BugLabs demo comes with a pre-build dashboard that connects seamlessly to an RL78/G14 RDK—once you’ve provisioned it and gotten it online.

Up and Running

To run the demo:

  1. First download the binary and flash it on the RDK using the Renesas Flash Programmer.
  2. Next create an account on Freeboard.io.
  3. Having done that you can clone a pre-made dashboard for the RDK by clicking on the Clone button at the bottom right of the screen. Keep that window open for the moment.
  4. Power up your RDK and press Switch 2 to enter provisioning mode:
    1. On your PC change your wireless connection to the RDK—which is now acting as a wireless access point—instead of the Internet.
    2. Open a browser window and type in the URL shown on the RDK’s display—192.168.240.1/prov.html.
    3. Click on Wireless and Network Configuration. Select an Existing Network—namely the one you were using for an Internet connection—and log in.
  5. With the provisioning done, now press the Reset button on the RDK. After about 10 seconds the BugLabs demo will start. Note the name of the “thing” on the RDK’s display.
  6. You can now go to dweet.io/follow and enter the name of the “thing” to follow the data on the board in real time. Or
  7. You can go back to Freeboard.io and enter the thing name into the dashboard you cloned and click on Set. The dashboard will now light up and respond to any changes on the RDK as well as enabling you to communicate with the board.

For a quick visual on how that works check out the brief (2:10) video below:


BugLabs promises “ridiculously simple dashboards for your devices.” In terms of the effort required to craft a slick interface to a powerful control board that isn’t far off the mark.