| DevJournal - Prepping for the Release | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Friday, 12 September 2008 | |
|
Sorry for the lag in updating the blog recently. I've been so busy with trying to prep the code for a release that I didn't seem to have the energy to post anything. It's difficult to write about Zigbee when you're eating, sleeping, and shitting it. Seems like there's a lot of activity going on in the wireless sensor networking space. There have been so many press releases recently, especially concerning home automation during the CEDIA show. It looks like next year may be when WSNs start picking up for consumers. Some trends I noticed recently were that companies are starting to integrate RF radios into their sensors . I think that this may start to gain more appeal if the WSN markets take off, since the standard WSN node usually consists of an RF module attached to a sensor anyways. Its just more convenient to package them together And another thing I'm seeing is that company's are starting to make Zigbee end device software with really small memory footprints. I think so far, most companies' end device software is just the router software with the router functions conditionally compiled out (via #ifdef). However I think that if someone wants to make a really small end device, they'd probably have to re-architect it, since there are many optimizations you can make if you don't have the requirement to integrate everything that a Zigbee router needs. And believe me, Zigbee routers need a lot of crap. I think that it should be easy to get an end device down below 16 kB flash and 2 kB RAM, and around that size and below, it would enable a lot of really low cost Zigbee nodes. As for my software, there have been a lot of bug fixes since I froze the development of my code. I've been implementing a test profile on one of the endpoints and I noticed a lot of problems. Some of it were stupid like the organization didn't make sense, and some of them were rather large bugs concerning bad pointer usage. Horrible...those are real killers. Anyways, I'm hoping to tie up the testing and fixes by mid next week and start prepping the documentation. After that, it should be all systems go for a source release late this month. This release is a bit stressful so I think I'm gonna take two or three weeks off after it goes out. I haven't had a vacation yet this year, and I can use the free time to play with my new PCB mill. Ha ha ha. Wish me luck... Hits: 150 Trackback(0)
Comments (4)
  written by Akiba, September 13, 2008
Just a warning. The upcoming release is mostly just for inspection. Its still going to be unstable and require a lot of work to get it into a usable condition. I can only guarantee that the data transfers work. On the other hand, the whole stack infrastructure should be present, so I'm hoping the remaining work will be mostly bug fixing, optimization, and developing the missing parts (ie: profiles, security).
report abuse
vote down
vote up
Votes: +0
 written by another engineer, September 16, 2008
Are you the lone developer on this? Why aren't you requesting any help? Is this your first release? What software license are you using? What target are you developing for?
Sorry for all the questions, but I'm just interested in your work. An open source ZigBee stack will be a huge step forward. I really like your blog. Keep it up! :-) You also made be curious about Contiki OS. Now that I've become addicted to learn more you've ruined my beauty sleep for at least the rest of the year. report abuse
vote down
vote up
Votes: +0
written by Akiba, September 16, 2008
I'm currently the only engineer on this project. It's more a matter of choice since things become more difficult to manage as the number of people on a project increase. Also, I think that things like protocol stacks usually turn out tighter if a single person develops it (ie: Adam Dunkels - uIP) vs a group effort (ie: Ethernut). Not to say that any is better than the other, but in my opinion, the uIP stack could not have been developed by a group.
The license will be GPL v2 and my initial target will be Atmel and their ATMega AVR AT86RF231. My eventual goal is to support multiple MCUs and my initial target list is AVR, MSP430, and ARM. They are all gcc friendly :p Of course I also want to support all of the standalone radios and eventually the SoCs, however most of the big semiconductor companies already provide S/W for the integrated MCU Radios. Thats pretty much it. If you check out Contiki, I would recommend looking at Adam's Rime wireless sensor stack. Its quite beautiful in its simplicity, but it expands to handle all features needed in a WSN node. report abuse
vote down
vote up
Votes: +0
Write comment
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comment form
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
wait for the release eagerly!