Usability and Performance Analysis of Embedded Development Environment for On-device Learning

This research empirically examines embedded development tools viable for on-device TinyML implementation. The research evaluates various development tools with various abstraction levels on resource-constrained IoT devices, from basic hardware manipulation to deployment of minimalistic ML training. The analysis encompasses memory usage, energy consumption, and performance metrics during model training and inference and usability of the different solutions. Arduino Framework offers ease of implementation but with increased energy consumption compared to the native option, while RIOT OS exhibits efficient energy consumption despite higher memory utilization with equivalent ease of use. The absence of certain critical functionalities like DVFS directly integrated into the OS highlights limitations for fine hardware control.