Hi all, I'm a potential new user to the world of TinyOS and nesC, and hope that some of you experienced users can answer my (hopefully) simple - but nevertheless - important questions. I'm working on a project where we are building small modular robots, where each module contains two halfs able to rotate about a common center. Each half contains an ATmega8 and an ATmega128 (communicating through I2C) and the two halfs communicate via the ATmega128's through a serial channel (RS485, actually). All boards are custom made for our purpose and are thus not Mica, Mica2 etc. Each module is able to communicated with other modules through IR diodes with the Blaulogic Pico-IrDA stack (http://blaulogic.com/ pico_irda.shtml) as protocol.
Now, until I read "The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Networked Embedded Systems" by David Gay et. al., we were convinced we were going to use the AvrX real-time kernel (http://www.barello.net/avrx/) for our modules but TinyOS/nesC seem to fit our needs in a much more elegant way. The original plan was to use C++ as programming language for easy porting to a standard PC for simulation purposes (just changing hw-layer) and for creating an "event" model - thus creating the abstraction with AvrX and C++, that TinyOS already seems to contain if I'm not mistaken. I have downloaded TinyOS 1.1.0 and nesC 1.1 (seems I have to update a few of the utils, though), and browsed the web for information, but I'm still in doubt on a few points and this is where I hope you can help me. 1) How difficult is it to "port" TinyOS to my platform? Is it just a matter of using platform/mica128 for my AT128's and making changes to platform/mica128 when using the AT8's? Or is it platform/avrmote? Or what has to be done? In the installation procedure there is a lot of talk about serial port communication and Java applications - are these things needed? 2) Is it possible to link a TinyOS application with a C-library (the Pico-IrDA library in particular)? And with a C++ library? 3) nesC generates one inline C-code file for a TinyOS application, right? Would it be possible to somehow use this code directly on a non-TinyOS platform - I'm thinking PC with Linux or Win - and link it with other C and C ++ code (for simulation purposes)? I really hope some of you can find the time to answer me since I have a few people to convice in the not so distant future if it turns out TinyOS can be used for our project. Otherwise we'll stick to AvrX as planned... Have a wonderful summer... Lars Dalgaard _______________________________________________ Tinyos-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.Millennium.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-users
