Has anyone made AWS Greengrass work with any Arduino boards? I have a sketch that works with their IoT Core service and would like to move it to Greengrass. However AWS is saying that Greengrass only supports ARM and x64 architectures at this time. Not sure if any Arduino boards fall into that category.
Thanks,
Steve
WhWhat is greengress?
Greengrass is Amazons Internet of Things service for edge devices. It allows you to build smart devices that can work even when disconnected from the cloud.
Ex. If you have weather sensor in a field with spotty Wi-Fi, Greengrass can process the sensor data locally and then send it to the cloud once Internet connection is established.
Not formally an Arduino, but the NodeMCU or WeMOS can do the same.
Record data on their internal Flash storage, and when the connection is there upload the new data to a server of your choice. Pretty straightforward to do.
Can those two boards run an Arduino sketch? Looks like Amazon has targeted Raspberry Pi with Greengrass. I dont want to rewrite my sketch just to make it run on a compatible board.
Usually it runs without any changes.
But you will have to add stuff as an Arduino (the ATmega based ones) doesn't have SPIFFS, doesn't have a built-in web server and WiFi connectivity, etc.
And there are more differences between the boards. The ESP8266 has firmware; it's 32-bit instead of the Arduino's 8-bit, it has less I/O ports some of which can't be used freely as they're used in the boot sequence, etc.
Devices that run Linux, including distributions such as Ubuntu and Raspian, and support Arm or x86 architectures can host the AWS IoT Greengrass Core.
There is your answer: Arduino can't run Linux, so can't host a AWS IoT Green grass Core.
To answer your other query, Arduino does not use x86 architecture. This is the architecture of PC processors made by Intel and AMD. Most Arduino do not use ARM architecture, which is the architecture of most smartphones, tablets etc. Some Arduino do have ARM architecture processors, but these are from the "M" series of ARM cores such as M0, M3 and M4. They are relatively powerful, but not nearly enough to run Linux.
So the smallest thing that can run Greengrass is going to be a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer. They can be quite small, like Pi Zero W, but they are not low power and not really suitable to run on batteries.
However, Raspberry Pi can often run Arduino sketches with some modifications. You can compile and run C++ code on Pi, and there are libraries available which provide some of the familiar Arduino functions like digitalWrite(), digitalRead() etc for the Pi's GPIO pins.