I’ve been spending the past week bringing up the ATXMega boards that I put together and porting Chibi over to them for testing the radio modules. While doing so, it also got me thinking about how I chose the parts and what the landscape for wireless sensor nodes is starting to look like.

The original idea of wireless sensor nodes was that they would be like dust. They’d be inconspicuous, ubiquitous, and you could essentially just sprinkle a couple all over the place to monitor some area that you’d like to keep tabs on. It was expected that wireless sensor nodes would be small, lean on memory resources, and extremely low power. Fast forward about seven years and we see that there are some real deployments going out with wireless sensor networks and the usage scenarios are much different than what was first envisioned.

It feels like wireless sensor nodes are going down two different paths. On the one hand, you still have extremely resource constrained nodes that are being used for specific applications. These would be like environmental monitoring or proprietary applications where the network and use cases are extremely well defined.

On the other hand, large scale deployments like the US smart grid (as well as the conversion over to smart meters in other countries) are showing that widespread adoption will put a limit on the minimum amount of resources required for a wireless node. One of the biggest resource consumers of a large scale deployment of wireless nodes is protocol standardization. 

One of the interesting things I've been seeing is that Macs are starting to become very common in the tech industry. Strangely enough, there is almost a majority of Mac users in Tokyo hackerspace which is heavily dominated by techies. I also see a lot of Macs in other hackerspaces and at events like the Make meeting in Japan. So it seems kind of strange that there is still very little support for embedded development on the Macs. In fact, I'd have to say that a lot of the info on how to set up embedded development environments on that OS is coming from the open source software and hardware communities. This is probably because they're widely used for Arduino development.

So I finally gave in and went out and bought a used Mac at a local second-hand computer equipment store. It was kind of sweet because it had an 2 GHz Intel Core2Duo CPU and quite a nice screen. It set me back about $400 which was really good considering how well Mac notebooks retain their value. The reason for the low price was that it had a US keyboard which is not very desirable in Japan, except for foreigners like me. 

After having used the Mac a bit, I can say that I understand why people like it. Apple obviously paid a lot of attention to usability and aesthetics. The GUI blows away the Windows XP GUI (I haven't tried Vista or Windows 7) and you can drop down to the command line and go straight into Unix. It's like the best of both worlds!

Anyways, enough gushing. The main reason I got the Mac was to figure out how to develop on the boards I'm making using that OS. It's becoming too important to ignore. Along the way, I can hopefully help others figure out how to set up their Mac environments for development on other boards and platforms. My first attempt at using a Mac for development was very basic. I wanted to access the bootloaders on the AVR USB microcontrollers to perform the fundamental operation of downloading code. It actually is very similar to Linux, however you need to do a couple of extra steps to get dfu-programmer to run on that OS. Once the setup is out of the way, downloading code is extremely easy.

And so, with no further ado, here's how to download code on AVR USB microcontrollers using a Mac. It's at the bottom of the original tutorial. Hope it's useful...

Tutorial Link

Well, I finally ran out of excuses to delay opening the store. There’s still a million things that I can do to tweak the store, boards, inventory or whatever but I’m sticking to my guns and enforcing my cutoff point. At least it will stop my wife from nagging me on when the shop will open. She's my toughest critic.

It’s been quite the journey just to reach this point and I’m definitely a better, or at least more knowledgeable, person for it. What started out as a “quick three month project” turned into a nine month odyssey where I learned that having good design skills is only a minor part of putting together a complete micro-manufacturing operation.

But First, Happy Birthday

A lot of things happened on the way as well. FreakLabs had its third birthday at the start of March. I was so busy taking care of tax issues at the time that I didn’t put up a post about it. I just wanted to say that I’m very happy with the site and how its evolving. Its taken on a life of its own and has become a valuable learning resource for me. This is mainly due to the people that frequent it and are kind enough to leave insightful comments and forum posts. The news feed also forces me to stay on top of things and helps me see how the WSN world is evolving.

I promised a while back to write an article describing what I’ve been through in starting a micro-manufacturing operation. There are a lot of books available to guide you through becoming independent, starting a website, and also starting a business. However there is a huge aspect to all of it that is neglected or just given lip service. It turns out that striking out on your own is a huge emotional and mental head game.

When I started down the micro-manufacturing path, part of it was to create a wireless tool set that I could use myself, and part of it was to create a business that could sustain myself and my family while I continued to work on open source software. While there was a lot of technical hurdles that had to be overcome, what I was completely unprepared for was the mental aspect of it all.

While I was trying to design products, build the website, figure out manufacturing, create documentation, generate content, understand accounting, source parts, and the millions of other things that it takes to start up a manufacturing operation, I spent a lot of time by myself and in my head. I had to confront a side of myself that I tried to suppress for a long time. It’s a very ugly side of me that is the culmination of all the emotional baggage I’ve accumulated over my lifetime.

When you go down the path of starting any business, there’s one huge thing you have to deal with: uncertainty. How you deal with it depends on a lot of factors. Preparation, experience, and skill level will take you to a certain point but you’ll eventually find that you’ll be facing situations that are completely new to you. This is where the head games start.

Greetings everyone. I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is the shop is delayed again. Just when I finished my taxes and thought I was clear to go, I got an email from my antenna supplier that my shipment was delayed due to stock issues. Although its possible to open the shop without antennas, I was hoping to be able to have all the components necessary for a WSN node so that people can order things in one shipment. It's kind of petty, but since its my first shop opening, I wanted it to be fairly complete.

When I was in the bay area a couple of months ago to visit my sister, she told me about a new series she was writing on Corporate Dropouts . Those are people that have left their jobs to pursue something more meaningful to themselves. Since I just so happened to be a corporate dropout, she interviewed me on why I decided to take that path and what motivated me to continue. She also included a picture of me on the front page from a couple years ago when I was a bit...heavier...thanks sis.

Anyways, if you're interested in checking it out, you can find it here. You might also want to check out her other articles on Corporate Dropouts because I think it's fascinating. People actually doing what they believed in...who woulda thunk it!

Link

I was just watching the PBS FrontLine documentary on the Digital Nation and it completely irritated me. Here were professors from MIT, one of the best technical institutions in the US, complaining about the students’ use of technology. I can’t even say that this is ironic, as much as it is just plain stupid.

The crux of the argument is that students these days are completely distracted because of the internet. They’re in the classroom, but rather than listening to the lecture, they’re googling things, reading articles, or probably chatting with their significant other. The professor is frustrated because he gave a simple exam that just tested on whether the students were paying attention in class and the students score poorly. The immediate thought that came into my head was why was the professor blaming the students rather than his teaching methods.

I teach classes at the Tokyo Hackerspace. My first class was a basic electronics class that was done with a lecture format and I took three hours to deliver everything I thought participants needed to know about electronics. It was enough information to give them a firm foundation and understand the basics of voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, and simple design patterns. That was a mistake, and the problem wasn’t the participants, it was with my assumption that they wanted to know the basics of electronics.

I finally realized that the problem was that I was telling them the basics so they could build on top of it. But without experiencing it for themselves, they would never understand why you need to limit the current of an LED or why you need to have bulk capacitors on a power supply. One of the reasons why the new MAKE: Electronics book is so great is because they encourage readers to break things as well as make them.

Anyways, I finally grasped the concept that people want to discover things for themselves. They want to understand why certain things are the way they are, rather than just be told it. They want to build things and customize them to make it their own and put their stamp on it. This is the proper way to teach people and has been for centuries, where the old master/apprentice relationships still existed.

This post is a slight departure from my normal posts which are usually about wireless. But since I'm technically part of the wireless sensor networking world, I figured a fun, little post about sensing might be appropriate.

I actually put this together about six months ago to show to the Tokyo Hackerspace back when we didn't have a space. We were meeting in restaurants and would show off our latest weird designs over there. It was really a horrible place with a lot of loud drunks and people shouting at each other. And that was just inside our booth :)

Anyways, I showed them that if you used capacitive touch sensors, you would actually be able to draw your own buttons and be able to sense touch events on them. Incidentally, if you tweak the sensitivity high enough, you can also sense touch events through insulators like wood and plastic which I always thought was kind of cool. Perhaps I'm going to play with that some other time.