[Tinyos-devel] Viptos 1.0.2 release available

[Elaine Cheong]

The Ptolemy Project at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce the third 
release (1.0.2) of Viptos (Visual Ptolemy and TinyOS), an integrated 
graphical development and simulation environment for TinyOS-based wireless 
sensor networks.

Please visit the website at:
http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/viptos

Highlighted new features:
- First non-beta release!
- Implemented Java and JNI exception handling.
- Node IDs in Surge demo are now displayed correctly.
- Compatible with both Linux and Cygwin.
- Based on the latest release of Ptolemy II (6.0.2).

Full abstract:
Viptos (Visual Ptolemy and TinyOS) is an integrated graphical development 
and simulation environment for TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. 
TinyOS is a component-based, event-driven runtime environment designed for 
wireless sensor networks.

Viptos allows networked embedded systems developers to construct block and 
arrow diagrams to create TinyOS programs from any standard library of 
TinyOS components written in nesC, a C-based programming language.  Viptos 
automatically transforms the diagram into a nesC program that can be 
compiled and downloaded from within the graphical environment onto any 
TinyOS-supported target platform.

Viptos is built on Ptolemy II, a modeling and simulation environment for 
embedded systems, and TOSSIM, an interrupt-level discrete event simulator 
for homogeneous TinyOS networks.  In particular, Viptos includes the full 
capabilities of VisualSense, a Ptolemy II environment that can model 
communication channels, networks, and non-TinyOS nodes.  Viptos extends 
the capabilities of TOSSIM to allow simulation of heterogeneous networks.

Viptos provides a bridge between VisualSense and TOSSIM by providing 
interrupt-level simulation of actual TinyOS programs, with packet-level 
simulation of the network, while allowing the developer to use other 
models of computation available in Ptolemy II for modeling the physical 
environment and other parts of the system.  This framework allows 
application developers to easily transition between high-level simulation 
of algorithms to low-level implementation and simulation.

Elaine Cheong
Ptolemy Project
University of California, Berkeley