DeviceTalk: A No-Code Low-Code IoT Device Code Generation

Whai-En Chen; Yi-Bing Lin; Tai-Hsiang Yen; Syuan-Ru Peng; Yun-Wei Lin

doi:10.3390/s22134942

DeviceTalk: A No-Code Low-Code IoT Device Code Generation

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jun 30;22(13):4942. doi: 10.3390/s22134942.

Authors

Whai-En Chen¹, Yi-Bing Lin^{1

2

3

4

5}, Tai-Hsiang Yen⁴, Syuan-Ru Peng⁴, Yun-Wei Lin⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, Taichung City 413305, Taiwan.
² China Medical School, College of Humanities and Sciences, Taichung City 40402, Taiwan.
³ Miin Wu School of Computing, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan.
⁴ College of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City 300093, Taiwan.
⁵ College of Artificial Intelligence, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City 300093, Taiwan.

Abstract

The deployment of a client-server-based distributed intelligent system involves application development in both the network domain and the device domain. In the network domain, an application server (typically in the cloud) is deployed to execute the network applications. In the device domain, several Internet of Things (IoT) devices may be configured as, for example, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and interact with each other through the application server. Developing the network and the device applications are tedious tasks that are the major costs for building a distributed intelligent system. To resolve this issue, a low-code or no-code (LCNC) approach has been purposed to automate code generation. As traditional LCNC solutions are highly generic, they tend to generate excess code and instructions, which will lack efficiency in terms of storage and processing. Fortunately, optimization of automated code generation can be achieved for IoT by taking advantage of the IoT characteristics. An IoT-based distributed intelligent system consists of the device domain (IoT devices) and the network domain (IoT server). The software of an IoT device in the device domain consists of the Device Application (DA) and the Sensor Application (SA). Most IoT LCNC approaches provide code generation in the network domain. Very few approaches automatically generate the DA code. To our knowledge, no approach supports the SA code generation. In this paper, we propose DeviceTalk, an LCNC environment for the DA and the SA code development. DeviceTalk automatically generates the code for IoT devices to speed up the software development in the device domain for a distributed intelligent system. We propose the DeviceTalk architecture, design and implementation of the code generation mechanism for the IoT devices. Then, we show how a developer can use the DeviceTalk Graphical User Interface (GUI) to exercise LCNC development of the device software.

Keywords: IoT; actuator; code generator; low-code; no-code.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Center for Open Intelligent Connectivity from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan; in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant 108-2221-E-009-047, Grant 107-2221-E-197-006-MY3, and Grant 108-2321-B197-003; and in part by the Ministry of Economic Affairs under Grant 107-EC17-A-02-S5-007.