tencent cloud

IoT Hub device SDK for C relies on a secure and powerful data channel to enable IoT developers to quickly connect devices to the cloud for two-way communication.

Note：

After v3.1.0, the SDK refactored and optimized the compilation environment, code, and directory structure, increasing the availability and portability.

Scope of Application of SDK for C

Featuring a modular design, the SDK for C separates the core protocol service from the hardware abstraction layer and provides flexible configuration options and multiple compilation methods, making it suitable for development platforms and use environments of different devices.

Network communication-capable devices on Linux/Windows

• For devices that have network communication capabilities and run on standard Linux/Windows, such as PCs, servers, and gateway devices, as well as advanced embedded devices such as Raspberry Pi, you can directly compile and run the SDK on them.
• For embedded Linux devices that require cross compilation, if the toolchain of the development environment has glibc or similar libraries which can provide system calls, including socket communication, SELECT sync IO, dynamic memory allocation, functions for getting time/sleeping/generating random number/printing, as well as critical data protection such as the mutex mechanism (only when multiple threads are required), only simple adaptation (e.g., changing the cross compiler settings in CMakeLists.txt or make.settings) is required before the SDK can be compiled and run.

Network communication-capable devices on RTOS

• For IoT devices that have network communication capabilities and run on RTOS, the SDK for C needs to be adapted to different RTOS systems for porting. Currently, it has been adapted to multiple IoT-oriented RTOS platforms, including FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, and TencentOS tiny.
• When porting the SDK to an RTOS device, if the platform provides C runtime libraries like Newlib and embedded TCP/IP protocol stacks like lwIP, adaptation for porting can be done easily.

Devices with MCU + communication module

• For MCUs that have no network communication capabilities, the "MCU + communication module" combination is often used. Communication modules (including Wi-Fi/2G/4G/NB-IoT) generally provide serial port-based AT instruction protocols for MCUs to communicate over the network. For this scenario, the SDK for C encapsulates the AT-socket network layer, where the core protocol and service layer don't need to be ported. In addition, it provides FreeRTOS-based and nonOS HAL implementation methods.
• In addition, IoT Hub provides a dedicated AT instruction set. If the communication module implements this instruction set, it will be easier for devices to connect and communicate, and less code will be required. For this scenario, please refer to the SDK for MCU AT dedicated to the Tencent Cloud customized AT module.

SDK Directory Structure Overview

The directory structure and top-level documents are described as follows:

SDK Compilation Method Description

The SDK for C supports three compilation methods:

• CMake
• Makefile
• Code extraction

For more information on the compilation methods and compilation configuration options, please see Compilation Configuration Description and Compilation Environment (Linux and Windows).

SDK Demos

The samples directory of the SDK for C contains demos showing how to use the features. For more information on how to run the demos, please see the corresponding documents in the SDK documentation directory.
For more information on device connection to and message sending/receiving in IoT Hub over MQTT, please see Getting Started with MQTT.

Notes

API changes for OTA update

Starting from SDK v3.0.3, OTA update supports checkpoint restart. When the firmware download process is interrupted due to network exceptions or other issues, the downloaded part of the firmware can be saved, so that the download can start from where interrupted instead of from the beginning when it is resumed.
After this new feature was supported, the methods of using relevant OTA APIs changed. If you have upgraded from v3.0.2 or below, you should modify your logic code; otherwise, firmware download will fail. For more information on how to modify it, please see samples/ota/ota_mqtt_sample.c.

Code name changes

To improve the code readability and comply with the naming conventions, SDK v3.1.0 incorporated changes to certain variables, functions, and macro names. If you have upgraded from v3.0.3 or below, you can run the tools/update_from_old_SDK.sh script on Linux to replace the names in your own code, and then you can use the new version of the SDK directly.