Twilio Microvisor Simplifies Low-Power IoT Device-to-Cloud Integration with Support for MQTT on Amazon FreeRTOS

Twilio Microvisor, the new offering for ultra-reliable and highly secure IoT connectivity for microcontrollers by Twilio IoT, now supports MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), a lightweight messaging protocol that is widely used in IoT for data transfer and communication between connected devices, on the Amazon FreeRTOS real-time operating system. 

Microvisor addresses the challenge of achieving robust and secure connectivity for IoT devices at scale, by way of introducing a hardware-protected hypervisor for microcontrollers to provide reliable and secure remote operations such as unbrickable over-the-air firmware updates, and secure remote live debugging as well as industry leading device-to-cloud security. Now, with Microvisor's support for MQTT on Amazon FreeRTOS along with sample libraries and application source code, developers can accelerate the building of secure MCU-powered IoT devices that utilize the MQTT protocol, e.g. for feeding data into AWS IoT Core. 

FreeRTOS, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017, is an open source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that provides a highly scalable and configurable platform for IoT applications. FreeRTOS is widely adopted in the industry and has been optimized to work seamlessly with a variety of microcontrollers, making it a popular choice for developers building IoT devices.

“Twilio Microvisor and its MQTT support allows us to fast-track the go-to-market of our IoT solutions. As Microvisor takes care of connectivity and fleet management for us, we can focus on helping our clients capture value for their business in weeks,” said Luis Ochoa, Systems Development Manager at Actus.io, an IoT monitoring solutions company. “Twilio Microvisor gives us speed and flexibility for our development process for solutions including energy consumption reduction for industrial equipment, real-time cold rooms monitoring, and real-time drive-thru waiting time measurement.”

“Twilio Microvisor and its innovative use of Arm TrustZone represents a significant advancement in IoT technology, enabling organizations to build more secure and reliable connected devices,” said Richard Barry, Founder of FreeRTOS, “With its support for MQTT on Amazon FreeRTOS, hardware designers looking to build low-power, MCU-based solutions who are in need of reliable connectivity now have an easier path to developing, deploying, and – most importantly but often ignored – scaling the production and management of connected devices.”

Twilio offers sample code and helpers on GitHub to help developers get started with an example application, and interested individuals can sign up for the Twilio Microvisor Beta Program to apply for a free development board to explore Microvisor on an STM32U585 MCU. With Microvisor, developers can quickly build IoT devices that are secure, reliable, and most importantly, scalable, making it the ideal choice for organizations of all sizes looking to benefit from a robust IoT infrastructure for their low-power devices with high security requirements.

“Embedded development for the edge is stuck in the past. No adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, flexible responses to changes in requirements,” says Jonathan Williams, Lead Product Manager at Twilio IoT for its device builder platforms division, “What we’re really trying to achieve with the microvisor-based approach to IoT is to bring agile to the world of edge-native development. The tremendous market reception we’ve seen to date confirms that we’re on the right track.”

Microvisor is currently in Beta. Firmware engineers looking to build on Microvisor can learn more at www.microvisor.com, and sign up for the Beta Program and apply for a free dev board here.