Taskify: An Integrated Development Environment to Develop and Debug Intermittent Software for the Batteryless Internet of Things

Abstract

Batteryless embedded devices rely only on ambient energy harvesting that enables stand-alone and sustainable applications for the Internet of Things. These devices perform computation, sensing, and communication when the harvested ambient energy in their energy reservoir is sufficient; they die abruptly when the energy drains out completely. This kind of operation, the so-called intermittent execution, dictates a task-based programming model for the development and implementation of intermittent applications. However, today’s task-based intermittent programs are tightly-coupled to the underlying run-time environments. This makes their debugging and testing difficult before deploying them into the target platform. To remedy this, we present Taskify, a tool that enables engineers to write and debug task-based intermittent programs in TaskDSL, i.e., a domain-specific language we designed for the development of intermittent programs on any general-purpose computer. Taskify automatically transforms these programs into C programs that can be linked to the underlying run-time environment and deployed into the target platform. Taskify is implemented as an Eclipse plugin. It has been evaluated on three intermittent applications.