Connectivity-Labs Announces the Open Source Version of C-DEngine, the Game-Changing IoT Framework
C-DEngine provides secure connectivity and rapid GUI development to industrial grade IoT projects
SEATTLE, Washington – (May 20, 2020) - Connectivity-Labs LLC (dba “C-Labs”), is announcing today the open source release of the C-DEngine (pronounced “seed engine”) - a Rapid Development Framework for distributed IoT solutions, under the MPL-V2-license.
The framework allows developers of industrial grade IoT solutions to overcome two daunting hurdles that they face today: (i) establishing secure connectivity from and to devices through firewalls and (ii) creating the graphical monitoring and management user interface (GUI) for IoT solutions that can run across mobile devices and browsers.
Secure Connectivity – Avoid having to Open Firewall Ports
Establishing secure, two-way communications between IoT devices and their controlling applications and services, especially if there are multiple firewalls in the path, as is the case when cloud-computing or mobile devices need to reach devices or machines on factory floors, has previously been extremely difficult to impossible to achieve.
To avoid the security vulnerability introduced by opening ports in the firewall, the C-DEngine creates IoT relays that reside behind the firewalls where they can initiate a secure, two-way connection via HTTPS or TLS to internal or external cloud-based services or mobile devices – problem solved!
Natural Machine Interface (NMI) – Rapidly Develop the IoT Project’s GUI
Each IoT solution is different because the devices, topologies, and problem domains vary widely. But one thing they all have in common is that a custom GUI must be created to monitor and manage it.
Previously, IoT projects spent months selecting a patchwork of technologies to develop the GUI for their IoT solution that often needs to run on Android, iOS, and popular browsers – it is not easy. The CD-Engine’s NMI capability solves the problem by providing everything needed for developers to rapidly create, and subsequently modify and expand the GUI for their IoT project in record time!
Already Proven – Now Open Sourced
Previously, the C-DEngine and its NMI were developed under the leadership of Chris Muench and Markus Horstmann at C-Labs Corporation. For the last eleven years the source code has been improved, refined, and made battle ready for the most demanding mission critical IoT application at companies including TRUMPF, who use it to monitor machining operations and have worked with Connectivity-Labs to open source the technology. It is now battle-tested, and its evolution is accelerating as the IoT community gets access to it and discovers its usefulness.
Who Should Be Looking at C-DEngine and its NMI?
The C-DEngine framework and its NMI capability provide the foundation for complete, stand-alone IoT projects, or they can be used in concert with Cloud-centric IoT platforms on Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google to enable very rapid proof of concept implementations, decrease development time when transitioning to a fully scalable, production ready solution with increased security and maintainability of deployed IoT projects.
While Connectivity-Labs is laser-focused on helping companies in the industrial internet of things (IIoT) market, we fully expect that the C-DEngine will benefit a broad range of applications outside the IIoT product space, such as robust consumer-oriented or embedded systems projects.
Introducing Connectivity-Labs LLC
To bring this proven technology to market, a new company has been created, Connectivity-Labs (dba “C-Labs”), which is headed up by Chris and Markus. It has the focus of providing, maintaining, and improving the C DEngine and its NMI capability in the open, with the help of the community and TRUMPF, as open source.
For additional details, and to join the C-DEngine open source project, see https://github.com/TRUMPF-IoT/C-DEngine or visit us at https://www.C-Labs.com.