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TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality

Posted by timothy on from the connecting-things-to-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader writes "When Google is clouding the borderline between web and the desktop, a much, much smaller project is blurring the border between the Internet and the physical reality: the newly released Contiki operating system version 2.2.1. Contiki runs on networked wireless sensors that are used for anything from road tunnel monitoring for fire rescue operations to collecting vital statistics from ice hockey players. These sensors typically have as little as a few kilobytes of memory and a few milliwatts of power budget — a thousandth of the resources of a typical PC computer — yet Contiki provides them with full TCP/IP connectivity. Meanwhile, San Francisco is monitoring parking spaces with wireless technology."

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Retarded headline by dafrazzman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is the point of this story, anyway? It seems to be about Contiki, but it ends with something on parking meters? How is clouding relevant?

    What does "Internet Protocol Meets Physical Reality" mean? Wireless interfaces in everyday applications have been around for years. Forget headlines, this whole story seems to be pointless.

    --
    My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
  2. Ubiquitous Computing by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is one of three parts that will enable ubiquitous computing - the ubiquitous data gatherers & environmental sensors.

    The second is a wireless routing protocol that really supports jumping from one AP to another (This will be worked out, probably as a derivative of cell phone networks, when people start roaming further than a single WiFi AP and demand seamless transitions) without disrupting existing sessions. More than just auto-connecting to a new AP, but having previous datastreams (streaming music, calls, chat) redirected to the new address and handing over authentication tokens as well.

    The third is a system capable of generating or pattern-matching meaningful information from new sensors without being explicitly told how (since not even a geek such as I would want to program my implants to recognize every new blobject they encounter). We'll get there eventually.

  3. Also runs on C64 by Saffaya · · Score: 5, Informative

    Looking at the wikipedia page :

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki

    Confirms why I thought of the C64 when I read Contiki.
    Here is a list of supported systems from wikipedia :

            * Computers:
                        o Apple II family[1]
                        o Atari 8-bit[1]
                        o Atari ST
                        o Atari Portfolio
                        o Casio Pocketview
                        o Commodore PET[1]
                        o Commodore VIC 20[1]
                        o Commodore 64[1]
                        o Commodore 128[1]
                        o GP32
                        o Oric
                        o PC-6001
                        o Sharp Wizard
                        o x86-based Unix-like systems, on top of GTK+ as well as directly using the X Window System[2]
            * Video game consoles:
                        o PC Engine
                        o Sega Dreamcast
                        o Sony PlayStation

            * Handheld game consoles:
                        o Nintendo Game Boy
                        o Nintendo Game Boy Advance

    Impressive features as well :

    A full installation of Contiki includes the following features:

            * Multitasking kernel
            * Optional per-application pre-emptive multithreading
            * Protothreads
            * TCP/IP networking
            * Windowing system and GUI
            * Networked remote display using Virtual Network Computing
            * A web browser (claimed to be the world's smallest)
            * Personal web server
            * Simple telnet client
            * Screensaver

  4. Using Contiki on my open source Zigbee project by freaklabs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Currently, there are two popular "OSes" being used for wireless sensor networks. One of them is TinyOS and one of them is Contiki. The challenge is that WSN nodes are usually battery operated, small, and need to last for a very long time. That means that you're memory restricted and power restricted which are difficult limitations for OS developers. I prefer using Contiki on my open source Zigbee project because its developed in ANSI C, unlike TinyOS which requires a variant of C called NesC. I'm also using a lot of libraries from Contiki which is keeping the protocol stack size down. I'm probably around 30-40 kB right now which is already big by WSN standards. FYI, the Contiki uIP protocol stack is about 20kB including the OS. The Contiki OS alone is about 2.5 kB, and some people have gotten TCP/IP on it running with 250 bytes of RAM. Not sure how they pulled it off. Contiki is really an amazing OS. For those interested in checking out my project, in can be found here: http://www.freaklabs.org/ Akiba