[Tinyos-devel] more bugging about current consumption on MicaZ in tinyos-2.x

[Eric Weddington]

> On 19/07/06, Eric Weddington <eweddington at cso.atmel.com> wrote:
> 
> > Being new to the area of wireless sensor networks, I've 
> been wondering 
> > about the idea of "off the shelf" platforms. How hard is it to 
> > introduce a new design? And now for the obvious bias: Specifically, 
> > how hard is it to introduce a new design with the new Atmel 
> AT86RF230 
> > radio? and possibly an ATmega1281? It would be interesting 
> to stack it 
> > up against the current "off the shelf" platforms.
> 
> What do you mean by "how hard is it to introduce a new 
> design", do you mean porting tinyos to this new design, 
> getting people to adopt it, or doing the design itself?
> If you mean the former, then here is some high-level feedback:
> Writing a driver for a new radio is  clearly  a good chunk of 
> work, but there are many existing drivers for radios with 
> diverse interfaces, so you have lots of models to go by.
> 
> 
> Supporting a new MCU will also be some work, and possibly 
> less smooth than for a radio, because tinyos has been made to 
> run on more radios than MCUs, and so things are probably more 
> mature on that side. But then again, the MCU abstractions are 
> now quite well defined. The other practical issue is whether 
> gcc supports the MCU. If it doesn't then that's another chunk 
> of work (david gay has explained somewhere on this list or on 
> tinyos-help what needs to be done to use a non-gcc compiler 
> with nesc, don't have the direct link at hand unfortunately).


Thanks, Henri, for your insights, they were quite valuable. Yes, GCC
supports the ATmega1281. However, this support is in WinAVR, not currently
in David Gay's specialized distribution of AVR GCC.

Eric Weddington