Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Don Zickus]

Hi Alexander,

I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/ mentions
a bunch of boards.  Some of those pointers don't work and the ones that do,
show standalone boards that need to be wired up to a SPI bus.

I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it difficult to
hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Don

Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Michael Richardson]

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Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> wrote:
    > I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
    > the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/
    > mentions

It depends a lot on what you want to do, what pieces you want to hack on,
and what devices you want to interoperate with.

The at86rf233 is popular and easily obtainable and Alex is doing lots of work
to support it.  Get the openlabs device.  It seems that we might be able
to support 6tisch on this device if we try hard enough, but for the moment
you are restricted to 1 channel and aloha-only time slots.

Many people are using openmote's connected via USB or via daughter card
to an RPI.   The openmote does the 6tisch stuff, but "bridges" (but/wrong
term, but have yet to find a better one) the raw 6lowpan packets over USB
using a custom encapsulation.  (I'd like to change it to ppp actually)

    > I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it
    > difficult to hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?

Yes, it's a bit painful since few desktops have easily accessible GPIO
pins that you can turn into a SPI bus.  You can add one with a FTDI USB
interface easily, but given the cost of an RPI... hard to argue.


--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     mcr@sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [


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Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Don Zickus]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 05:19:54PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> wrote:
>     > I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
>     > the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/
>     > mentions
> 
> It depends a lot on what you want to do, what pieces you want to hack on,
> and what devices you want to interoperate with.

Pretty simple.  Just want to see how well the technology works.  With all
the industry's talk about IoT, we are just trying to set up in our lab
various technologies that customers may ask us about.  And we want to see
how well it works with our products. :-)

> 
> The at86rf233 is popular and easily obtainable and Alex is doing lots of work
> to support it.  Get the openlabs device.  It seems that we might be able
> to support 6tisch on this device if we try hard enough, but for the moment
> you are restricted to 1 channel and aloha-only time slots.

Ok, thanks for the suggestion!

> 
> Many people are using openmote's connected via USB or via daughter card
> to an RPI.   The openmote does the 6tisch stuff, but "bridges" (but/wrong
> term, but have yet to find a better one) the raw 6lowpan packets over USB
> using a custom encapsulation.  (I'd like to change it to ppp actually)

Interesting so it would be 6lowpan over usb serial?

> 
>     > I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it
>     > difficult to hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?
> 
> Yes, it's a bit painful since few desktops have easily accessible GPIO
> pins that you can turn into a SPI bus.  You can add one with a FTDI USB
> interface easily, but given the cost of an RPI... hard to argue.

Hehe.  Good point.

Thanks for the feedback!  I will probably buy some stuff and start playing
with it.

Cheers,
Don

Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 28.07.2016 19:40, Don Zickus wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
> 
> I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
> the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/ mentions
> a bunch of boards.  Some of those pointers don't work and the ones that do,
> show standalone boards that need to be wired up to a SPI bus.
> 
> I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it difficult to
> hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?

You might be able to do this with some USB dongle exposing some GPIOs to
to the kernel but I never used anything like that. Most of my
transceivers are connected to Pi's. So it goes down to embedded.

I'm in the lucky position though to have two ATUSB dongles which are
simple USB dongles and get connected to your x86 systems with ease.
They work out of the box in mainline since 4.1 and the firmware is open
source as well. The problem right now is that it is now longer being sold.

We are working on changing this though. See my mail from a few minutes
ago to this list about interest for a new ATUSB production batch.
Right now we would estimate them being on sale again sometime in October
(the smaller fabs we are using for SMT is on holiday and we also need to
prepare things in our spare time).

If this is to far away, fair enough. If it does not really matter to you
and you would have an interest to use them please let me know so I can
better estimate the needed number of devices for the batch.

regards
Stefan Schmidt

Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Marcin K Szczodrak]

To just get a feeling of how the technology works, OpenThread is one
way of discovering 15.4 and it's Thread standard. One can use various
dev boards to run OpenThread, such as Zolertia's RE-Mote or TI's
CC2538 dev kit. Alternatively, there are also very good kits from
SiLabs, NXP (Freescale) and Dialog (check OpenThread Sandbox
Development Platform).

 From a Linux perspective, it might be worth playing with OpenThread
and wpantund, a user-space 15.4 driver that talks to 15.4 radio chip
over UART or SPI. In this setup, one could flash 15.4 with OpenThread
and run wpantund on a Linux host to create a Thread network gateway,
which typically is used by low-power 15.4 only devices to get outside
of the Thread network.

Best,
Marcin

On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Stefan Schmidt
<stefan@datenfreihafen.org> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> On 28.07.2016 19:40, Don Zickus wrote:
>> Hi Alexander,
>>
>> I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
>> the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/ mentions
>> a bunch of boards.  Some of those pointers don't work and the ones that do,
>> show standalone boards that need to be wired up to a SPI bus.
>>
>> I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it difficult to
>> hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?
>
> You might be able to do this with some USB dongle exposing some GPIOs to
> to the kernel but I never used anything like that. Most of my
> transceivers are connected to Pi's. So it goes down to embedded.
>
> I'm in the lucky position though to have two ATUSB dongles which are
> simple USB dongles and get connected to your x86 systems with ease.
> They work out of the box in mainline since 4.1 and the firmware is open
> source as well. The problem right now is that it is now longer being sold.
>
> We are working on changing this though. See my mail from a few minutes
> ago to this list about interest for a new ATUSB production batch.
> Right now we would estimate them being on sale again sometime in October
> (the smaller fabs we are using for SMT is on holiday and we also need to
> prepare things in our spare time).
>
> If this is to far away, fair enough. If it does not really matter to you
> and you would have an interest to use them please let me know so I can
> better estimate the needed number of devices for the batch.
>
> regards
> Stefan Schmidt
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Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 01/08/16 00:34, Marcin K Szczodrak wrote:
> To just get a feeling of how the technology works, OpenThread is one
> way of discovering 15.4 and it's Thread standard. One can use various
> dev boards to run OpenThread, such as Zolertia's RE-Mote or TI's
> CC2538 dev kit. Alternatively, there are also very good kits from
> SiLabs, NXP (Freescale) and Dialog (check OpenThread Sandbox
> Development Platform).
>
> From a Linux perspective, it might be worth playing with OpenThread
> and wpantund, a user-space 15.4 driver that talks to 15.4 radio chip
> over UART or SPI.

We are aware of them and I already has some mails with Jonathan from 
Nestlabs to see how we can work together here.


In this setup, one could flash 15.4 with OpenThread
> and run wpantund on a Linux host to create a Thread network gateway,
> which typically is used by low-power 15.4 only devices to get outside
> of the Thread network.

What you are describing is the network co-processor setup (NCP). This 
sadly means that Linux is only aware of the very high level 
characteristics of the Thread network. IP address range, routes, etc.
The rest would all be handled in the device firmware. With OpenThread 
this would be at least open source.

On the other hand the linux-wpan and 6LoWPAN stack we are working on 
here is capable of handling the PHY and MAC layers as well. Thus we are 
aiming for a way to run the higher level bits of OpenThread in userspace 
while having at least 15.4 and 6LoWPAN be dealt with by the existing 
subsystems. I'm working my way through the code right now to see what is 
needed on our side to support the OpenThread use cases and what 
interfaces we would need to offer. I should be able to but some initial 
thoughts into the wiki by the end of the week maybe.

In my opinion the NCP as well as the native linux use case are both 
valid and it depends on your idea or project/product what you want to use.

regards
Stefan Schmidt

Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Don Zickus]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 12:02:29AM +0200, Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> On 28.07.2016 19:40, Don Zickus wrote:
> > Hi Alexander,
> > 
> > I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
> > the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/ mentions
> > a bunch of boards.  Some of those pointers don't work and the ones that do,
> > show standalone boards that need to be wired up to a SPI bus.
> > 
> > I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it difficult to
> > hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?
> 
> You might be able to do this with some USB dongle exposing some GPIOs to
> to the kernel but I never used anything like that. Most of my
> transceivers are connected to Pi's. So it goes down to embedded.
> 
> I'm in the lucky position though to have two ATUSB dongles which are
> simple USB dongles and get connected to your x86 systems with ease.
> They work out of the box in mainline since 4.1 and the firmware is open
> source as well. The problem right now is that it is now longer being sold.

This sounds like a simple way to get started...

> 
> We are working on changing this though. See my mail from a few minutes
> ago to this list about interest for a new ATUSB production batch.
> Right now we would estimate them being on sale again sometime in October
> (the smaller fabs we are using for SMT is on holiday and we also need to
> prepare things in our spare time).
> 
> If this is to far away, fair enough. If it does not really matter to you
> and you would have an interest to use them please let me know so I can
> better estimate the needed number of devices for the batch.

I don't see an archives for this mailing list, so I can't see your previous
email.  How much would this cost? I might be up for buying 5 or so.

Cheers,
Don

Re: Looking for boards with an 802.15.4 chip

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 01.08.2016 20:10, Don Zickus wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 12:02:29AM +0200, Stefan Schmidt wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> On 28.07.2016 19:40, Don Zickus wrote:
>>> Hi Alexander,
>>>
>>> I was wondering what boards/chips folks like yourself use to develop/test
>>> the 802.15.4 work?  I noticed the website  http://wpan.cakelab.org/ mentions
>>> a bunch of boards.  Some of those pointers don't work and the ones that do,
>>> show standalone boards that need to be wired up to a SPI bus.
>>>
>>> I assume the SPI bus is easily found on a rPI-like board.  Is it difficult to
>>> hook one of them up to an x86 desktop?
>>
>> You might be able to do this with some USB dongle exposing some GPIOs to
>> to the kernel but I never used anything like that. Most of my
>> transceivers are connected to Pi's. So it goes down to embedded.
>>
>> I'm in the lucky position though to have two ATUSB dongles which are
>> simple USB dongles and get connected to your x86 systems with ease.
>> They work out of the box in mainline since 4.1 and the firmware is open
>> source as well. The problem right now is that it is now longer being sold.
> 
> This sounds like a simple way to get started...

That is the idea. Breaking down some of the barriers. Still not as easy
as BT or WiFi but at least a good step forward to use it on a normal
development machine.

>>
>> We are working on changing this though. See my mail from a few minutes
>> ago to this list about interest for a new ATUSB production batch.
>> Right now we would estimate them being on sale again sometime in October
>> (the smaller fabs we are using for SMT is on holiday and we also need to
>> prepare things in our spare time).
>>
>> If this is to far away, fair enough. If it does not really matter to you
>> and you would have an interest to use them please let me know so I can
>> better estimate the needed number of devices for the batch.
> 
> I don't see an archives for this mailing list, so I can't see your previous
> email.  How much would this cost? I might be up for buying 5 or so.


One archive is on spinics.net. Here is a link to my mail about this
topic: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wpan/msg04084.html

As you can see we are estimating how big the production batch needs to
be. The price point would be 50 EUR with a little hope to cut it down a
bit. We can't make promises on the later one though. I will keep the
list informed.

regards
Stefan Schmidt