The 2023 Best of Sensors Awards celebrates the most innovative product in the sensor ecosystem and the people and companies involved in their creation. There are 14 categories of awards, and each entry is judged on the ingenuity of the designs, their effectiveness in addressing pertinent issues, and the commercial value they offer. This year, Dojo Five won the award in the Instrumentation & Test category for EmbedOps, which isn't a sensor but a development tool that makes developing software for sensors easier.
Creating consistent build environments, ensuring thorough testing, and seamlessly integrating Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) can be challenging for embedded systems developers. EmbedOps is a tool that aims to change this and transform how embedded systems development happens. EmbedOps offers a comprehensive solution to streamline the development process and improve software quality by providing reliable and consistent build-and-test environments, which have the potential to redefine the landscape of embedded systems development.
When asked about EmbedOps, Tom Dever, vice president of products at Dojo Five, said it "enables embedded software teams to fully automate, build, and test pipelines by leveraging containerized environments built on Docker and modern continuous integration and test tools."
EmbedOps was created to address the pain points faced by embedded systems developers. It improves the software development environment by ensuring consistent builds using containers which eliminates the headaches of software discrepancies between systems. By centralizing the management of automated continuous integration (or CI) testing pipelines, EmbedOps makes sure that the code gets tested before it is released, resulting in higher-quality software. By integrating Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) testing, it also verifies that the software will function in real-world scenarios.
EmbedOps will fit into any CI pipeline used by embedded firmware developers. By offering centrally managed test and build environments, EmbedOps makes developer onboarding simple. Developers will be up to speed in minutes, not days, according to the company. Because it uses modern CI systems, it also saves valuable time and resources.
EmbedOps comes with a comprehensive set of components to make embedded development easier. Its web-based and command-line tools simplify the setup and management of builds. These tools integrate with automated CI pipelines, ensuring that production CI processes run the same as they would on a CI server. The containerized environment houses build dependencies like compilers, testing frameworks, and code quality tools which allows development environments to be constructed or reproduced rapidly and reliably.
EmbedOps integrates with commonly used tools already available in the market, reducing developer learning curves. Interactions with containers and CI pipelines are simplified, allowing development teams to focus on their code rather than the tooling. The platform can be extended to include custom integrations for CI systems not currently supported and consciously avoids vendor lock-in.
Dojo Five is based in St. Paul, Minn., and has a distributed workforce across the U.S. With more than 335 years of combined expertise, the staff at Dojo Five help companies optimize their embedded software development systems by bringing tools, techniques, technologies, and culture to deliver modern firmware for embedded systems.
To find out how other companies are innovating in the sensor industry, check out our article on the 2023 Best of Sensors Awards.