Two new Contiki-based products posted today:
- The WigWag home automation system
- The Vibrain smart city solution
Monday, July 1, 2013
More Contiki-based products posted
Two new Contiki-based products posted today:
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Contiki's Internet of Things: From Badgers to Light Bulbs
What does swans, badgers, data centers, city streets, and light bulbs have in common? Contiki!
The Internet of Things will be a revolution. It will be everywhere. These Contiki-based systems are some of the early signs of what to expect:
- The Oxford badger tracking system – also used to track swans, hares, and eagles
- The tado° smart thermostat
- The Rad-DX radioactive radiation monitor
- The Zolertia city street noise monitoring system
- ... and many more on the Contiki website!
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Self-powered Contiki Power Sensor Wins IPSO 2013 Challenge
Need to know how much power that flows through a specific power cord, and see the information directly on your smartphone? That's exactly what the Contiki-based winner of the IPSO 2013 challenge does. Just clip on the sensor on cord and see the data from anywhere in the world – the sensor sends the measurements wirelessly and securely across the Internet. Best of all: no batteries need to be replaced, ever, as the sensor is completely self-powered.
The wireless power sensor, developed by Redwire Consulting, Boston, MA, won the IPSO 2013 Challenge last week. Aside the fame and recognition, winning the competition also included a $10000 USD check.
The sensor that is clipped-on to an power cord measures the current flowing through the wire and sends the data wirelessly to a cloud server, hosted at lowpan.com. By using Contiki and its IPv6 stack, the sensor can send its readings directly to the cloud, without having any protocol translator boxes involved.
IPSO 2013 Challenge chairman Nick Ashworth said "The innovation, simplicity and end-to-end utilization of IP technology made this entry stand out to the judges."
The Redwire system was not the only Contiki-based system to compete in the IPSO 2013 challenge. The full list of entries can be found here.
More coverage:
The wireless power sensor, developed by Redwire Consulting, Boston, MA, won the IPSO 2013 Challenge last week. Aside the fame and recognition, winning the competition also included a $10000 USD check.
The sensor that is clipped-on to an power cord measures the current flowing through the wire and sends the data wirelessly to a cloud server, hosted at lowpan.com. By using Contiki and its IPv6 stack, the sensor can send its readings directly to the cloud, without having any protocol translator boxes involved.
IPSO 2013 Challenge chairman Nick Ashworth said "The innovation, simplicity and end-to-end utilization of IP technology made this entry stand out to the judges."
The Redwire system was not the only Contiki-based system to compete in the IPSO 2013 challenge. The full list of entries can be found here.
More coverage:
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Contiki Regression Tests: 9 Hardware Platforms, 4 Processor Achitectures, 1021 Network Nodes
tl;dr: Contiki gets regression test framework from Thingsquare with travis integration that lets us test every new commit on 9 hardware platforms, 4 processor architectures, and 1021 emulated network nodes.
Despite its size, Contiki a complex system with multiple layers of interrupts, processes, protothreads, serial port input and output functions, radio device drivers, power-saving duty cycling mechanisms, medium access control protocols, multiple network stacks, fragmentation techniques, self-healing network routing protocols, best-effort and reliable communication abstractions, and Internet application protocols. These run on a wide range of different microprocessor architectures, hardware devices, and is compiled with a variety of C compilers.
Typical Contiki systems also have extreme memory constraints and form large, unreliable wireless networks. How can we ensure that Contiki, with all these challenges, does what it is supposed to do?
Over the years, open source projects have tried different ways to ensure that the code always is stable across multiple platforms. A common approach has been to ask people to test the code on their own favorite hardware in good time before a release. This was the approach that Contiki took a few years ago. But the problem was that it is really hard to get good test coverage, particularly for systems that are inherently networked. Most testers won't have access to large numbers of nodes and even if they have, tests are difficult to set up because of the size of networks that are needed for testing. Also, since people are more motivated to run tests near a release, there may potentially be large numbers of bugs that are found right before the release. It would be great to be able to find those bugs much earlier.
Many projects do nightly builds to ensure that the source code is kept sane. This is something we have done for a long time in Contiki: the code has been compiled with 5 different C compilers for 12 platforms. But this is not enough to catch problems with code correctness, as the functionality of the system is not tested. Testing the functionality is much more difficult, since it requires us to actually run the code.
Fortunately, Contiki provides a way to run automated tests in large networks with a fine-grained level of detail: Cooja, the Contiki network simulator. But taking this to a full regression test framework took a bit of work.
First, to make scripted simulation setups easier, Cooja author Fredrik Österlind wrote a test script framework for Cooja. Second, Github contributors Rémy Léone and Ilya Dmitrichenko developed a travis plugin for Contiki. And now Contiki gets a new regression test framework from Thingsquare Mist.
Cooja simulate networks of nodes, where each node can be a highly detailed emulator of a specific hardware device. Thanks to mspsim and avrora, Cooja can emulate the TI MSP430 CPU, with a recent addition of the MSP430x architecture, and the Atmel AVR. Nodes can also run non-emulated Contiki code compiled for the native platform, typically the x86.
With Cooja, the regression test framework, and travis, can now run regression tests on every single commit done to the repository. We spot problems early in the development process; even before the code gets into the repository. Although regression tests do not provide a full certainty that the code works in all situations, it does help us spot showstoppers. This lets us all sleep well at night, knowing that any new code in the system is not only reviewed by the Contiki developers and automatically built, but that the code is automatically run in a range of different network setups, with a number of different network protocols, and on multiple platforms and processor architectures.
The regression test framework resides inside directory in the Contiki root, regression-tests/. To run the complete set of regression tests, simply run make in this directory and all tests will run. Each test prints out either OK or FAIL ಠ_ಠ to indicate success or failure of each test.
The regression-tests/ directory contains a set of subdirectories:
Each test directory contains a number of tests. Simulation test directories contain Cooja csc files, who's names also start with two digits. For example, the 02-hello-world/ directory contains:
Some of the tests include hundreds of networked nodes, whereas others contain only a single node. For example, the multithreading and hello-world tests contain only one node each. Some of the IPv6/RPL and Rime tests contain hundreds of nodes, to test the scalability of the network protocols by checking that the behave correctly even if the number of neighbors and routes exhaust the neighbor and routing tables used by the network protocols.
A few statistics for the new regression test setup:
Despite its size, Contiki a complex system with multiple layers of interrupts, processes, protothreads, serial port input and output functions, radio device drivers, power-saving duty cycling mechanisms, medium access control protocols, multiple network stacks, fragmentation techniques, self-healing network routing protocols, best-effort and reliable communication abstractions, and Internet application protocols. These run on a wide range of different microprocessor architectures, hardware devices, and is compiled with a variety of C compilers.
Typical Contiki systems also have extreme memory constraints and form large, unreliable wireless networks. How can we ensure that Contiki, with all these challenges, does what it is supposed to do?
Over the years, open source projects have tried different ways to ensure that the code always is stable across multiple platforms. A common approach has been to ask people to test the code on their own favorite hardware in good time before a release. This was the approach that Contiki took a few years ago. But the problem was that it is really hard to get good test coverage, particularly for systems that are inherently networked. Most testers won't have access to large numbers of nodes and even if they have, tests are difficult to set up because of the size of networks that are needed for testing. Also, since people are more motivated to run tests near a release, there may potentially be large numbers of bugs that are found right before the release. It would be great to be able to find those bugs much earlier.
Many projects do nightly builds to ensure that the source code is kept sane. This is something we have done for a long time in Contiki: the code has been compiled with 5 different C compilers for 12 platforms. But this is not enough to catch problems with code correctness, as the functionality of the system is not tested. Testing the functionality is much more difficult, since it requires us to actually run the code.
Fortunately, Contiki provides a way to run automated tests in large networks with a fine-grained level of detail: Cooja, the Contiki network simulator. But taking this to a full regression test framework took a bit of work.
First, to make scripted simulation setups easier, Cooja author Fredrik Österlind wrote a test script framework for Cooja. Second, Github contributors Rémy Léone and Ilya Dmitrichenko developed a travis plugin for Contiki. And now Contiki gets a new regression test framework from Thingsquare Mist.
 |
| Cooja, the Contiki network simulator |
Cooja simulate networks of nodes, where each node can be a highly detailed emulator of a specific hardware device. Thanks to mspsim and avrora, Cooja can emulate the TI MSP430 CPU, with a recent addition of the MSP430x architecture, and the Atmel AVR. Nodes can also run non-emulated Contiki code compiled for the native platform, typically the x86.
With Cooja, the regression test framework, and travis, can now run regression tests on every single commit done to the repository. We spot problems early in the development process; even before the code gets into the repository. Although regression tests do not provide a full certainty that the code works in all situations, it does help us spot showstoppers. This lets us all sleep well at night, knowing that any new code in the system is not only reviewed by the Contiki developers and automatically built, but that the code is automatically run in a range of different network setups, with a number of different network protocols, and on multiple platforms and processor architectures.
The regression test framework resides inside directory in the Contiki root, regression-tests/. To run the complete set of regression tests, simply run make in this directory and all tests will run. Each test prints out either OK or FAIL ಠ_ಠ to indicate success or failure of each test.
The regression-tests/ directory contains a set of subdirectories:
01-compile/The directory names start with two digits to create an explicit ordering and allow doing iterative regression testing. For example, if working on the RPL code, go into the 11-rpl/ directory and run make to check that the regression tests for RPL work, without having to run all the other tests that aren't relevant to the RPL code.
02-hello-world/
03-base/
04-rime/
05-netperf/
06-shell/
07-elfloader/
08-collect/
09-ipv4/
10-ipv6/
11-rpl/
12-ipv6-apps/
Each test directory contains a number of tests. Simulation test directories contain Cooja csc files, who's names also start with two digits. For example, the 02-hello-world/ directory contains:
MakefileThe files that start with two digits are run, in order, when running make in the directory. The file named x03-crosslevel.csc has been disabled, by putting an x in the beginning of the filename.
01-multithreading.csc
02-sky-coffee.csc
x03-crosslevel.csc
04-sky-checkpointing.csc
Some of the tests include hundreds of networked nodes, whereas others contain only a single node. For example, the multithreading and hello-world tests contain only one node each. Some of the IPv6/RPL and Rime tests contain hundreds of nodes, to test the scalability of the network protocols by checking that the behave correctly even if the number of neighbors and routes exhaust the neighbor and routing tables used by the network protocols.
A few statistics for the new regression test setup:
- Number of automated tests: 42
- Number of build platforms: 11
- Number of compiled examples: 38
- Number of C compilers used: 4
- Number of processor configurations tested: 9
- Number of processor architectures tested: 4 (AVR, MSP430, MSP430x, x86)
- Number of network stacks tested: 3 (IPv4, IPv6, Rime)
- Number of network protocols tested: 16
- Total number of network nodes used in the tests: 1021
- Average number of per-node neighbors: 252.7
Monday, October 29, 2012
Contiki goes Github
To make it easy for everyone to contribute their cool new features, improvements, and bugfixes, the Contiki project (finally) moves to Github! Read all about it in this email to the contiki-developers mailing list.
Fork the Contiki code at the Contiki github repository:
Want to contribute your coolest code to Contiki? Check out the instructions here:
Fork the Contiki code at the Contiki github repository:
Want to contribute your coolest code to Contiki? Check out the instructions here:
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Getting a Contiki Q&A site started - your help is needed
Wouldn't it be nice to having a real Q&A site like stackoverflow.com for Contiki? The mailing list is great and all, but having something community moderated has a lot of advantages.
We have set up an Area51 site on stackexchange.com to get this started. Once it has enough followers, sample questions, and votes, then the site becomes live and experts can answer questions.
How can you help? Read all about how to help this get off the ground here:
In short, you need to join the site, follow it, ask 5 questions and vote up 5 questions. Pretty simple! The wiki is also tracking the posted questions so that if you think of more than 5 questions, you can write them down. And if you can't think of 5 questions, check the wiki. Later, after the "definition" stage, we will need answers. So in the meantime, you can post them to the wiki as well.
We hope this would work well as a great Q&A forum for Contiki. Let's make it happen!
We have set up an Area51 site on stackexchange.com to get this started. Once it has enough followers, sample questions, and votes, then the site becomes live and experts can answer questions.
How can you help? Read all about how to help this get off the ground here:
In short, you need to join the site, follow it, ask 5 questions and vote up 5 questions. Pretty simple! The wiki is also tracking the posted questions so that if you think of more than 5 questions, you can write them down. And if you can't think of 5 questions, check the wiki. Later, after the "definition" stage, we will need answers. So in the meantime, you can post them to the wiki as well.
We hope this would work well as a great Q&A forum for Contiki. Let's make it happen!
New Contiki Wiki
We have set up a new Contiki community wiki here:
Unlike the previous wikis that Contiki has had, we now have an explicit Creative Commons license for all contributions. If you have added something to the old wiki, please move it to the new one to make sure it is covered by the new license.
Unlike the previous wikis that Contiki has had, we now have an explicit Creative Commons license for all contributions. If you have added something to the old wiki, please move it to the new one to make sure it is covered by the new license.
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