Variable arguments on ARM architectures

Hacking around into ARM and thinking about scheduling I was thinking about C functions variable arguments: although not very useful for a small operating system like NxOS, I thought that including the va_* functions into the base library would be cool. Even if it seemed quite simple, I’ve thought to check it out from a [...]

Shared UART/CC2420 access for the msp430 (TinyOS)

I’m proud to annunce the first, still totally untested, version of the DispatcherC component, currently hosted on the mercurial repository (http://freehg.org/u/dacav/tiny_cynar_dispatcher/ ).

The component provides:

A protocol for nxt commands encoding
A modularized code that allows the programmer to access both the cc2420 radio and the uart

Some code available

I’ve published a mercurial repository containing all the development source code for this project. Everything can be found at:
http://freehg.org/u/dacav
Since my last post, a lot of time ago, the project underwent some changes due to technical discussion and organizational delays: some code in nesC has been written for the synchronization between tmotes nodes. The code has [...]

TinyOs U[s]art: so in[s]idious!

So damned world of TinyOS!
How many snares!
You can say it loud!!
On these days we are experimenting troubles, since we need to make the TMote communicate with the NXT brick. The thing probably doesn’t seem so bad… after all we’ve got both a working Rs485 driver on the NxOS, and a consolidated operating system like TinyOS [...]

Lurking on the Web

It seems that we’ll need to write software for both sides of the boat! Ok, this is not so surprising or unexpected…
The point is that, in order to learn how to move in the TinyOs environment, I’ll need to know something about NesC. Lurking on the web I’ve found this interesting paper… it seems to [...]

Searching for RS485

RS485 Communication
It has been decided that the Mindstorms brick will communicate with the Tmote with a RS485 communication interface. On the NXT this interface is situated on the 4th RJ11 port.
In these days I’m trying to find out information on the RS485, since I’m going to develop a serial software protocol. As asserted at wednesday’s [...]

Other operating systems for Mindstorms

In these days I’ve tried an alternative operating system for the Lego NXT called NXOS. The link of NXOS webpage has been put into my blogroll.
The operating system seems not to be a RTOS, but I like how it’s structured and managed. Here follow a brief overview of my very early experience with that system:

2nd Week results

Now it’s time for me to summarize what I learned in these days:
The compiling procedure:
As the Lejos OSEK name suggests, a configuration requires to be implemented by using the OSEK Implementation Language, hence the compiling procedure must run through the parsing of some code written in OIL. In this particular case a windows executable named [...]

Uploading tools: it should work

I’ve put my hands inside the “old” lejos nxj code: the source tree provides even two version of the uploading software runc (the same runc.exe that I mentioned in my previous post) and fwflash. As runc is “based on fwflash”, it’s supposed to be enhanced…

Uploading tools replacement

The uploading procedure implies the use of the windows executable named runc.exe. This program should be executed under cygwin, so this puts me in the strange situation of running cygwin under wine.