[Tinyos-alliance] Draft 8051 WG Charter

[Philip Levis]

On Oct 10, 2006, at 12:09 PM, Philippe Bonnet wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Following our last telecom, here is a draft charter for a WG around  
> TinyOS for 8051. I finally chose a short version of the charter (as  
> opposed to the core working group). I also chose to focus on the  
> technical aspects (I considered adding some promotion aspects wrt  
> the 8051 vendors and OEM but decided against it). I consider it is  
> the workgroup responsibility to define the subset of 8051 versions  
> for which an implementation is provided. It will I believe depends  
> on the involvement of companies and OEMs. I also decided to have a  
> quite open formulation about the toolchain and the necessary  
> adaptation of Nesc in the absence of gcc.  Also, it is implicit in  
> the charter that 8051 is outside the scope of the tinyos core. I  
> considered that the mere existence of  a 8051 WG placed it outside  
> the core. Would you agree?

My sense is that right now, the 8051 is outside of the core. At  
least, that's what the core WG thinks. So much of the design of  
TinyOS (1.x and 2.x) hasn't considered the issues that the 8051  
brings up.

The core WG, however, is very interested in 8051 and wants it to  
succeed. The price point of 8051 chips (and inclusion in SoC 15.4  
solutions) means that it is a very important processor to consider. I  
think that as the 8051 WG figures out where TinyOS fits and where it  
doesn't, we might see the core evolve to try to bridge the gap. Right  
now, it seems like a lot of the stumbling blocks are compiler issues,  
rather than interfaces and components, but as 8051 digs deeper, more  
might come to light.

Phil