Leo:TinyOS-development
Contents
Working with motes and the Testbed
These notes are by Leo Selavo. Follow them at your own risk.
Programming a TelosB mote
To program a TelosB mote you need to compile your program for telosb and then install it.
make telosb make reinstall telosb
Programming a mote on a specific USB port
If you have a testbed with many motes attached to a computer by USB hub, you may want to select a specific mote for reprogramming. Then you need to specify the port using "bsl,<port>" argument on the make telosb reinstall line, as in the examples below.
In order to see which ports are assigned to the motes, run motelist.
In Windows - Cygwin
$> motelist Reference CommPort Description ---------- ---------- ---------------------------------------- XBQDTMW2 COM35 Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQ8OQ47 COM36 Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQF0342 COM37 Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQF033F COM38 Crossbow Telos Rev.B $> make telosb reinstall bsl,36
The above example will program the mote on COM37 (notice the COM number is higher by one).
In Linux - Ubuntu
$> motelist Reference Device Description ---------- ---------------- --------------------------------------------- XBQDTMXJ /dev/ttyUSB0 XBOW Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQDTMWO /dev/ttyUSB1 XBOW Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQDTN1D /dev/ttyUSB2 XBOW Crossbow Telos Rev.B XBQDTN9C /dev/ttyUSB3 XBOW Crossbow Telos Rev.B $> make telosb reinstall bsl,/dev/ttyUSB2
The above example will program the mote on USB2.
Programming a mote with a specific address
Sometimes you want to give the mote a specific address, that will be used by the mote software, for example, to identify which mote is sending what packets. This address is accessible in TinyOS program as TOS_NODE_ID.
To specify the address when uploading the program you include the address as an integer after reinstall, like this (note the comma inbetween):
make telosb reinstall,17 bsl,/dev/ttyUSB5
The above command will install the software to the mote attached as USB5, with the address 17.
Listening to packets
To see the communication coming from the sensor network you can use Serial Forwarder and Listen tools that come with TinyOS. For this one mote must be programmed using TOSBase (in TinyOS-1.x) or BaseStation (in TinyOS-2.x, $TOSROOT/apps/Basestation) application and attached to the computer's or Tmote Connect devices USB port.
Serial forwarder will act as a gateway between the serial (or USB) port and the TCP port, usually port 900x.
Using Tmote Connect
When motes are attached to Tmote Connect, you can check the web interface to the Tmote Connect for the port numbers assigned to the connected motes. You may need to export MOTECOM variable specifying the port as in the example below and then you can use the java Listener tool to see raw packets coming in.
export MOTECOM="sf@10.176.254.16:9002" java net.tinyos.tools.Listen
The example above assumes that the Tmote Connect is on the IP address 10.176.254.16 and the mote is accessible via port 9002 which usually is the second USB port. To speed things up I alias the above commands for your working environment.
Extra tools
I have written some extra tools (in perl) to make tinyos development life easier.
* pretty-gcc.pl - Pretty compilation errors - colorizes the output of gcc and hides uninteresting output. Piping the compilation error output to this tool I find the errors much faster, because they stand out. You may want to alias the bellow to something shorter.
make telosb 2>&1 | perl /home/elo/bin/pretty-gcc.pl
* relisten.pl - pipe the "java net.tinyos.tools.Listen" to this tool to reformat the hex-dump to a few decimal numbers that can be imported to a spreadsheet later. Specify the single and double byte fields in the perl file in your local copy, see the comments in the file. You can pipe the result further in a log file as needed (just do not cancel it before the log file is flushed).
java net.tinyos.tools.Listen | perl relisten.pl
