Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo

You might have seen one of these headlines a while back: ‘Microsoft Windows now running on Intel Galileo development board’, ‘Microsoft giving away free Windows 8.1 for IoT developers’. Now before we all get too excited, let’s have a closer look beyond these headlines and see what we’re actually getting!

Intel Galileo

With a zillion devices being connected to the Internet by the year 2020 a lot of hardware manufacturers want to have a piece of this big pie, and Intel got into the game by releasing two different development boards / processors: the Intel Galileo and more recently the Intel Edison.

The Galileo is Intel’s first attempt to break into consumer prototyping, or the ‘maker scene’. The board comes in two flavours, Gen 1 and Gen 2 with the latter being a slightly upgraded model of the first release.

Like many other development platforms the board offers hardware and pin compatibility with a range of Arduino shields to catch the interest from a large number of existing DIY enthusiasts. The fundamental difference between boards like the Arduino Uno and the Intel Galileo is that Arduino devices run on a real-time microcontroller (mostly Atmel Atmega processors) whereas the Galileo runs on a System on Chip architecture (SoC). The SoC runs a standard multi-tasking operating system like Linux or Windows, which aren’t real-time.

Both Gen1 and Gen2 boards contain an Intel Quark 32-bit 400 MHz processor, which is compatible with the Intel Pentium processor instruction set. Furthermore we have a full-sized mini-PCI express slot, a 100 Mb Ethernet port, microSD slot and USB port. The Galileo is a headless device which means you can’t connect a monitor via a VGA or HDMI unlike the Raspberry Pi for example. The Galileo effectively offers Arduino compatibility through hardware pins, and software simulation within the operation system.

The microSD card slot makes it easy to run different operating systems on the device as you can simply write an operating system image on an SD card, insert it into the slot and boot the Galileo. Although Intel offers the Yocto Poky Linux environment there are some great initiatives to support other operating systems. At Build 2014 Microsoft announced the ‘Windows Developer Program for IoT’. As part of this program Microsoft offers a custom Windows image that can run on Galileo boards (there’s no official name yet, but let’s call it Windows IoT for now).

Windows on Devices / Windows Developer Program for IoT

Great, so now we can run .NET Framework application, and for example utilise the .NET Azure SDK? Well not really, yet… The Windows image is still in Alpha release stage and only runs a small subset of the .NET CLR and is not able to support larger .NET applications of any kind. Although a simple “Hello World” application will run flawlessly, applications will throw multiple Exceptions as soon as functionality beyond the System.Core.dll is called.

So how can we start building our things? You can write applications using the Wiring APIs in exactly the same way as you program your Arduino. Microsoft provides compatibility with the Arduino environment with a set of C++ libraries that are part of a new Visual Studio project type when you setup your development environment according to the instructions on http://ms-iot.github.io/content/.

We’ll start off by creating a new ‘Windows for IoT’ project in Visual Studio 2013:

The project template will create a Visual C++ console application with a basic Arduino program that turns the built-in LED on and off in a loop:

Now let’s grab our breadboard and wire up some sensors. For the purpose of this demo I will use the built-in temperature sensor on the Galileo board. The objective will be to transmit the temperature to an Azure storage queue.

Since the Arduino Wiring API is implemented in C++ I decided to utilise some of the other Microsoft C++ libraries on offer: the Azure Storage Client Library for C++, which in return is using the C++ REST SDK. They’re hosted on Github and Codeplex respectively and can both be installed as Nuget packages. I was able to deliver messages to a storage queue with the C++ library in a standard C++ Win32 console application, so assumed this would work on the Galileo. Here’s the program listing of the ‘main.cpp’ file of the project:

The instructions mentioned earlier explain in detail how to setup your Galileo to run Windows, so I won’t repeat that here. We can deploy the Galileo console application to the development board from Visual Studio. This simply causes the compiled executable to be copied to the Galileo via a file share. Since it’s a headless device we can only connect to the Galileo via good old Telnet. Next, we launch the deployed application on the command line:

Although the console application is supposed to write output to the console, none of it is shown. I am wondering if there are certain Win32 features missing in this Windows on Devices release, since no debug information is outputted to the console for most commands that are executed over Telnet. When I tried to debug the application from Visual Studio I was able to extract some further diagnostics:

Perhaps this is due to a missing Visual Studio C++ runtime on the Galileo board. I tried to perform an unattended installation of this runtime it did not seem to install at all, although a lack of command line output makes this guesswork.

Conclusion

Microsoft’s IoT offering is still in its very early days. That doesn’t only apply to the Windows IoT operating system, but for also to Azure platform features like Event Hubs as well. Although this is an Alpha release of Windows IoT I can’t say I’m overly impressed. The Arduino compatibility is a great feature, but a lack of easy connectivity makes it just a ‘thing’ without Internet. Although you can use the Arduino Ethernet / HTTP library, I would have liked to benefit from the available C++ libraries to securely connect to APIs over HTTPS, something which is impossible on the Arduino platform.

The Microsoft product documentation looks rather sloppy at times and is generally just lacking and I’m curious to see what the next release will bring along. According to Microsoft’s FAQ they’re focussing on supporting the universal app model. The recent announcements around open sourcing the .NET Framework will perhaps enable us to use some .NET Framework features in a Galileo Linux distribution in the not-to-distant future.

In a future blog post I will explore some other scenarios for the Intel Galileo using Intel’s IoT XDK, Node JS and look at how to connect the Galileo board to some of the Microsoft Azure platform services.