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This article proposes the BIPES, a Block based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems, including its architecture, design and validation results. BIPES is an open source software and service that is freely available through the website http://www.bipes.net.br and has been conceived from our experience of several years developing embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and teaching. It allows anyone to quickly and reliably design, program, build, deploy and monitor embedded systems, IoT devices and applications using blocks or Python based programming. It is fully based on web environment, so absolutely no software installation is needed on the client developer machine. In this way, a tablet, a netbook, a Chromebook or any other device can be used to program and test several types of devices. Mainly, it relies on MicroPython or CircuitPython, WebREPL, WebSockets, Web Serial API, HTML, JavaScript and Google Blockly to allow no-code programming (blocks) to be translated into Python code and then deployed to the target board. Moreover, it does not require server side processing, so it can be deployed as a Progressive Web Application (PWA), allowing it to be used even when the computer is offline. It is compatible with several low cost boards such as: mBed, BBC micro:bit, ESP8266, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi using only a web browser and without the need to install any software on the device where the user develops the programming.

This paper presents the NPi-Cluster, an energy proportional computing cluster that automatically powers ON or OFF the number of running machines according to the actual processing demand. A theoretical model is proposed, discussed, and implemented on a cluster composed of Raspberry Pi computer boards designed and built in order to test the proposed system architecture. Experimental results show adequate performance of the proposed platform when compared with other web servers running on traditional server architectures, but with considerably less power consumption. The power consumption of the entire cluster is about 14 W when running at maximum performance. In this situation, the system is able to handle more than 450 simultaneous requests, with about 1000 transactions per second, making it possible to be used as a server capable of handling real web workloads with acceptable quality of service. When the requests demand is reduced to a minimum, the power consumption is dynamically reduced until less than 2 W. Additionally, the proposed cluster architecture also provides high availability by reducing single points of failure on the system.