IoT Firmware and Device Management

Overview​

A comprehensive solution for managing firmware updates across multiple IoT solutions and fleets of variants of Seeed Studio ESP32 IoT devices using AWS IoT Core Jobs and Over-The-Air (OTA) updates. This project contains a number of blogs each with a focus in an specific area of this OTA firmware update solution, on how to scale IoT device management from a single prototype to hundreds or thousands of devices in multi-environment architecture; as well as links to Github repositories to the source-code.

Goals​

This project aims to achieve the following objectives for IoT device management at scale:

• Remote Updates: Enable firmware updates without physical device access
• Multi-Device Support: Manage diverse device types with different firmware requirements from a single system
• Safe Deployment: Orchestrate controlled rollouts across large fleets with minimal risk
• Visibility: Maintain comprehensive tracking of firmware versions across all devices
• Reliability: Provide fast rollback capabilities to recover from problematic updates

Solution Architecture​

Built a complete OTA firmware management system with:

• Centralized firmware storage in S3
• AWS IoT Jobs for update orchestration
• Automated rollout strategies (canary, rolling, all-at-once)
• Device-side OTA implementation in Arduino/C++
• AWS CDK infrastructure as code

Technologies Used​

• Device Firmware: Arduino C++, ESP32 (ESP-IDF)
• Cloud Services: AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Jobs, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB
• Infrastructure: AWS CDK (TypeScript)
• Build Tools: PlatformIO, Arduino CLI
• Languages: C++, Python, TypeScript

Key Components​

1. Single Codebase Architecture​

Unified codebase supporting multiple device types:

• Compile-time configuration for different hardware
• Shared core functionality
• Device-specific adaptations
• Version management across variants

2. OTA Update System​

Reliable over-the-air updates with:

• HTTPS firmware download from S3
• Cryptographic signature verification
• Dual partition failsafe mechanism
• Automatic rollback on failure
• Progress reporting to cloud

3. AWS IoT Jobs Integration​

Leverage AWS IoT Jobs for:

• Remote update triggering
• Update status tracking
• Fleet-wide rollout control
• Job execution history
• Failure handling and retry logic

4. Agentic Firmware Management​

AI-powered firmware management using Claude:

• Natural language update requests
• Automated firmware compilation
• Intelligent rollout strategies
• Anomaly detection and alerting