Thanks for your input!

When you are talking about the new chip revision, do you talk about the rf231???
Can you be more explicit about the "several errors and lack of configuration 
options" of the automatic modes?

Thanks again,
Fred

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Miklos Maroti
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 3:44 PM
To: Frederic Beaulieu
Cc: tinyos-help@millennium.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: [Tinyos-help] Atmel RF230

Hi Fred,

> I currently looking to integrate the RF230 transceiver from Atmel in one of
> my design and I just wonder if someone have something to tell about it. Is
> the chip follow the spec given by Atmel (sensitivity, timing, etc)?

I cannot verify the sensitivity, but the published timings to control
the state machine of the radio chip is correct.

> Is there a lot of bugs with the chips?

The basic operation mode works as advertised. The automatic mode had
several errors and lack of configuration options that prevented the
tinyos 2.x driver to use that mode. Nonetheless, the basic mode is
perfectly appropriate to do everything at least as good as the cc2420
driver does. We can send a (software generated) acknowledgement frame
in less than 200 microsecond. The chip has a new revision and corrects
most of the early problems of the first revision. However I did not
investigate if the automatic mode would be useful. Also, the original
revision does not have an automatic CRC check for the received packets
in the basic mode, this is corrected in the new revision.

I have observed that under very rare circumstances (in a 1 microsecond
window), that the chip can get stuck between the receive state and
transmit state. If you switch to PLL_ON state and a message arrives
just then, then the chip does not switch to RX_BUSY but stays in
PLL_ON. When I initiate the transmission with the SLP_TR pin, but then
the chip does not goes to BUSY_TX but stays in PLL_ON and I suspect
that the TRX_END interrupt correspond to the received message and not
the transmitted message. This can be detected if you verify that the
chip goes to BUSY_TX. Everything goes back to normal with the RX_ON
command.

> How can it be compare to TI c2420 or Freescale MC1319x?

I cannot really compare. I think the programming interface of the chip
is simpler than that of the CC2420.

> In fact, I'm interested by all little thing you can have experienced with it 
> and that are not documented ;)

Look at the RF230 code in the tinyos 2.x tree, you can learn stuff
there, but pretty much it works as it supposed to work if you used it
correctly.

Miklos

_______________________________________________
Tinyos-help mailing list
Tinyos-help@millennium.berkeley.edu
https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-help

Reply via email to