Skip to main content

Introduction

Memfault is a full device monitoring solution which can be integrated into any embedded device utilizing ARM Cortex-M or ESP32 MCUs irrespective of the RTOS in use or connectivity path in place.

How does it work?

  1. Using the lightweight memfault-firmware-sdk, full device coredumps, backtraces, debug registers, logs, and custom metrics can be collected.
  2. Data structures collected are framed into packets that can be as small as 9 bytes so they can be sent over whatever transport you use (e.g. Bluetooth, LTE, WiFi, LoRa, Zigbee, or even proprietary protocols).
  3. The Memfault cloud reassembles data structures from received packets and analyzes them to classify the issue, identify a possible root cause, and recover items such as variable and function names from the binary data.
  4. The Memfault cloud automatically de-duplicates similar issues. Notifications are used to let you know when problems are detected. From the Memfault web application, individual issues can be drilled into and overall fleet health can be examined via dashboard views.

Getting Started

The memfault-firmware-sdk is designed as a collection of components, so you can include only what is needed for your project.

Integration Guides

We have step-by-step guides which cover how to add the SDK to a project, capture an error, and publish data to the Memfault cloud:

Create a Memfault Account

The following guides assume you already have a Memfault Account. If you don't yet have one, you can create one here.

MCU ArchitectureGetting Started Guide
ARM Cortex-MARM Cortex-M Integration Guide
nRF Connect SDKnRF Connect SDK Integration Guide
ESP32 ESP-IDF (Xtensa and RISC-V)ESP32 ESP-IDF Integration Guide
ESP8266ESP8266 RTOS Integration Guide
Dialog DA1469xDA1469x Integration Guide
NXP MCUXpresso RT1060NXP MCUXpresso SDK for i.MX RT Guide
Zephyr RTOSZephyr Integration Guide
ARM Cortex-RARM Cortex-R Integration Guide

Modules

Once the memfault-firmware-sdk is in place, a number of modules can easily be integrated into the system:

  • Coredumps - Allows one to collect the system state when the device hangs, crashes or asserts unexpectedly.
  • Reboot Reason Tracking - allows one to collect why devices are rebooting in the field (whether it be due to a crash, brownout or a firmware update). Summaries and aggregates can then be viewed from the Memfault web application.
  • Device Metrics - A flexible way to collect system health vitals that are important to your application (whether it be battery life, connectivity statistics, performance measurements or something else!). From the Memfault web application, metrics are plotted over time for any device and fleet wide summaries can be viewed via dashboards.
  • Error Tracking with Trace Events - allows one to collect lightweight events (<40 bytes) when error conditions occur. These events can be collected while the system is running and can be used to discover how often unexpected errors are occurring (flash write failures, I2C bus timeouts, etc).

Design Documents

The Memfault data collection system was designed from the ground up with embedded devices in mind. Deeper explorations into the designs of the subsystems can be found below:

  • Event Serialization - Describes how Memfault event serialization was optimized for embedded applications and how it compares against other serialization strategies.
  • Data Transport - Examines how data is shuttled from the device to the cloud

Example Projects

We provide fully functional example projects for specific development boards. These examples can be used as a quick way to try out Memfault without needing to modify an existing project.

BoardThumbnailExample Project
ESP32-WROVER-KIT V4.1
Note: other ESP32 boards should work similarly
From the Memfault SDK:
- examples/esp32
nRF9160 DKNordic maintains an example app included with the nRF Connect SDK:
- nRF-Connect SDK samples/nrf9160/memfault

The Memfault SDK includes a basic example:
- examples/nrf-connect-sdk/nrf9160
MIMXRT1060-EVKB
Note: other NXP RT10xx boards should be nearly compatible with the example application source, but will require a different MCUXpresso SDK for hardware support
Note: a detailed integration guide can be found here
- mcuxpresso-rt1060-example
STM32L4 Discovery Kit for IoT Node (B-L475E-IOT01A)From the Memfault SDK:
- examples/zephyr
PSoC™ 64 Standard Secure - AWS Wi-Fi BT Pioneer Kit (CY8CKIT-064S0S2-4343W)From the Memfault SDK:
- examples/cypress/CY8CKIT-064S0S2-4343W
PSoC™ 62S2 Wi-Fi BT Pioneer Kit (CY8CKIT-062S2-43012)Detailed integration guide:
- here
Example project:
- https://github.com/memfault/mtb-example-memfault
SmartBond™ DA14585 Bluetooth Low Energy Pro Development KitFrom the Memfault SDK:
- examples/dialog/da145xx
Dialog SmartBond™ DA14695 Bluetooth® Low Energy 5.2 USB Development KitDetailed integration guide:
- here
From the Memfault SDK:
- examples/dialog/da1469x