[Tinyos Core WG] meeting: 5/20

[Philip Levis]

Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 09:30 AM US Pacific Time
Bridge: 4
Passcode: 7783119

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Agenda:
   Membership: Tinynode maintenance transfer to Yannick Weibel
   Membership: Steve Ayers (shimmer2, details follow)
   Packet interfaces (Miklos + Jan + everyone)

Shimmer 2:

hi phil,

as a co-creator of the shimmer* platforms, my commitment is ongoing,  
so i can definitely grant you all one year with an open-ended renewal!

by way of background:

colleague ben kuris and i -- ben does board/hardware design and  
manages manufacturing, i do the rest -- have been doing designs of  
msp430-class platforms since 2003.  we were at hplabs/cambridge  
research lab then -- a larger project group then -- and turned to  
tinyos in '04 to make sense of platform/module portability (with a bit  
of a nudge from matt welsh, fer sher).

the tos-1.x/contrib/handhelds tree grew from those efforts, arriving  
as a rather large collection of capabilities en masse in august 2005.

the first shimmer appeared in spring '06, and was added to the tos-1.x  
repository that august.  i have been the contrib/handhelds czar since,  
and have presided over all platform-related development and maintenance.

i guess at this point, this is the only actively maintained part of  
v1, for which i support users in about 20 countries through both  
konrad's shimmer-users list and keeping a close eye on tinyos-devel  
for any shimmer-related questions that pop up.

i'm adding support for tos-2.x at this point because, well, it's  
overdue and i'm finally able to make the effort; luckily, i can  
leverage konrad's work putting the base platform into v2.  we also  
have other users who are beginning to use tos-2.x, so i'm going to  
jump in now with the next rev of shimmer (which i released to v1 in  
jan '08).  guess you could say we're putting our stake in the ground.

short-term (spring into early summer) plans are to bring v2 support up  
to v1 snuff, adding bluetooth and support for a number of daughter  
cards.  i also have an implementation of fat fs that i'm now testing,  
so this will go to v1 first (have to support those users now, then  
immediately to v2).

i also plan to migrate to v2 a now quite-mature tcp/ip with-all-of-the- 
toys implementation done by andy christian back at crl as soon as the  
dust settles.


shimmer and shimmer2 are low power wearable sensing platforms targeted  
at health applications and research.  the key features are:

- 8MHz Texas Instruments MSP430 CPU (10Kbyte RAM, 48Kbyte Flash, 8  
Channels of 12 bit A/D)
- Class 2 Bluetooth radio
- 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 Chipcon wireless transceiver
- 3-Axis Freescale accelerometer
- MicroSD slot for up to 2Gbyte
- Integrated Li-Ion battery management
- Extension connectors (Internal and external) for application  
customization

shimmer2's main feature upgrades are a soft power switch, and an mcu- 
bypass mechanism for the micro-sd card when docked, which speeds data  
transfers by three orders of magnitude over conventional serial  
transfers.

it is available through the live e-commerce site at http://www.shimmer-research.com