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DevJournal - Hooked Up, Baby...

Written by Akiba

Friday, 03 October 2008

The guys at Atmel came through for me and hooked me up with 2 sets of their AT86RF231 platforms. The timing is perfect because now that the release is finished, the next objective is to port the stack to hardware and get it working. Since Atmel is the only major 802.15.4 chip supplier to hook me up, looks like they'll be the first platform that the stack gets ported to.

The setup is pretty sweet. Two of the base boards have USB connectivity and you can even load the Daintree Basic Edition sniffer (free download from Atmel) on to it. That's good because I've been using a Microchip Zena sniffer (circa 2005) and the software on it is getting a bit aged. Especially since the Zigbee spec went through two revisions since I've had it.

The other two boards are the same boards that Atmel gives out for their AVR LCD evaluations and development. It has a 128x64 RGB graphical LCD and you can download the software for the graphics widgets from their site. Looks like I'm gonna be havin' some fun.

The radios are the AT86RF231 boards which aren't available with the low-cost Raven kits. These boards have the AES security engine and the antenna diversity feature so its gonna be interesting to check them out. Especially for the security, that will be the next portion of the stack that I'll be working on.

Thanks, Ingolf! Let's go clubbing next time you're in Tokyo.

Here are some pictures of the dev kit that I'll be working on for now: