Intel / E2E Developer Experience

Mission statement Enabling developers to be fast[er] to the market, with an integrated toolset that manages the layered complexity of IoT product development. A web based development tool that provides a central point for synchronisation across the product cycle.

LaunchBox platform We worked on the developer experience defining an E2E platform to enable fast to the market solutions for IoT developers.
Our initial research focused on the competitor solutions, on interviews and user testing to gather information on the point of view of the users, their needs, and the existing workspace, software and tools they use.
We defined main tools necessary to create and deploy IoT projects, a scalable solution that could cover quick prototypes and complex multiple projects.

The vision The vision for the LaunchBOX platform includes several web-based tools for developers:

Dashboard
The dashboard displays the status of all the projects, with analytics, teams, libraries, and hardware used in the projects.
Project space
The project space is the core of a project. Here developers have the complete control over the hardware and the software of a project, the team that is working on it, the libraries, third party APIs, and so on.
Editor
A single tool that merges both the code and the board editors / documentation. A flexible, customisable, web based, developer tool to have the complete control of both hardware and software.

Launchbox Edu Kit The work done on the E2E Developer Experience gave us the opportunity to explore a possible Education Kit, using the same developing tools that we had designed, but simplified and tweaked for younger and non-expert target group.
The research on the ‘IT at school’ market showed that if the primary school segment is at the moment full of new and promising products, there is a gap between the secondary school and the university level. Here is where the Launchbox Edu Kit focuses, with combining all the strong points of the Launchbox platform in a more simple way.
We worked with Intel Labs and Do It Kits, and developed a platform that can be used at school to teach both hardware and software with a more professional approach (yet easy), considering the limitations of the infrastructure, and the UK curriculum for secondary school education.

Demos & prototypes We developed a working demo of both hardware setup and software support, providing a complete web-based application with a Javascript based editor integrated in the platform. We worked with Do It Kits to include real projects and kits that are already used at school, enhancing the user experience with video and step by step tutorials, images, and code samples.

A second version of the demo implemented a backend control panel (WordPress) with smart upload solutions in order to upload projects and tutorials in a more easy way.
We made several 3d printed and laser-cut physical kits that can work with the demo and the online editor.

JS IDE for Zephyr OS Based on the E2E Developer Experience body of work, and on the working demo of the IoT Edu, we started developing a web app with the Editor + Board Explorer [interactive documentation of the boards] for the maker target group, as IoT prototyping tool for developers.
Working with the Intel OTC web development team we released the JS IDE for Zephyr OS as an open source web-based project in February 2017 (link to GitHub).
JS IDE for Zephyr OS is a creative development tool to build projects, apps, and more. An online JavaScript editor that lets you upload code to a board powered by Zephyr OS, directly from the browser, taking advantage of WebUSB APIs implemented in Google Chrome.

An extended version of the JS IDE for Zephyr OS is on the roadmap with more tools for the community, and more advanced tools for the development, and for the board explorer. All features based on the vision of the E2E Developer Experience we defined during the 2016.