Mukesh Sankhla's ESP32-Powered Retro-Logger Gets Old Industrial Hardware Talking to the IoT
With Secure Boot capabilities courtesy of Thistle Technologies, the Retro-Logger aims to breathe new life into old equipment — securely.
Maker and educator Mukesh Sankhla has designed an Espressif ESP32-powered device that can get legacy industrial hardware talking to the Internet of Things (IoT) over their existing serial buses, protected by Thistle Technologies' security platform: the Retro-Logger.
"Here is the thing: these old machines still work," Sankhla explains of the hardware targeted by the Retro-Logger. "They're precise, reliable, and battle-tested. But replacing them is expensive and disruptive. So… why not make the old smart instead of replacing it? Retro-Logger is a modern-day solution for a late-20th-century problem: how to get decades-old industrial machines to talk to the cloud. It is a secure, ESP32-based IoT data logger that taps into UART serial ports, standard on most legacy equipment, to read data and upload it to the cloud in real-time."
The heart of the Retro-Logger is a DFRobot FireBeetle ESP32-E development board, built around an Espressif ESP-WROOM-32E microcontroller with two Tensilica Xtensa LX6 processor cores running at up to 240MHz, 520kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 4MB of flash storage plus single-band Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.2 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios. Elsewhere in the 3D-printed housing are four status LEDs and a spring-loaded terminal for serial connectivity.
Getting old industrial hardware to talk to the IoT, then, could be as simple as wiring the Retro-Logger up to its serial port and having it transmit to a remote database — but Sankhla's design includes the all-to-often forgotten "S" in "IoT": security. The Retro-Logger includes Secure Boot capabilities, powered by Thistle's security platform. "With Secure Boot enabled," Sankhla explains, "no one can reprogram the device without proper authorization. Unauthorized or malicious firmware is automatically blocked, preventing potential security breaches. Only properly signed and authenticated firmware will be accepted by the device."
The project is documented in full here on Hackster.io; more information on the Secure Boot system is available on the Thistle website.
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.