Thank you for writing me back. I was a TA for an embedded systems
course last semester and the following discourse articulates mine and other
student experiences. I hope you will see that these are small misfortunes, but
they add up to an annoying mass. Allow me to take you through what goes on in
the mind of a new user.
=======
The first thing that is missing from is a little bit of
consistency and definitions on the Installing
TinyOS page. For example the Automatic installation, which new users
are likely to try first is a little bit all over the place. For example the
term "toolchain" is not defined and students file it just another
complicated term. Can we just call it compilers for the uProcessors used on the
various motes?
If the user chooses Manual instllation using RPM packages there are no clear
instructions how to install the "native compilers"
(which are called "toolchain" in the Automatic installation, and what
is native about it anyway?).
In the TI MSP430 Tools section a comment reads "...wow
this is outdated. Don't use any of this…. ". This is not helpful at all.
Instead we can tell the user how to install it.
The Manual
installation takes the code from yet another
repository. Probably a brief discussion of the various repositories would be
helpful. What we have on github? What happened to google code? What is
tinyprod? Where is the contrib repository? and so on.
OK, enough about that, lets follow an installation processes. I’ll
start with the
"Automatic installation - for Debian based
systems" available at
http://tinyos.stanford.edu/tinyos-wiki/index.php/Getting_started#Installing_TinyOS_2.1.1
The first thing that we do is to ask
our user to follow yet another link. To Eric Decker's installation. Eric’s pages
are excellent articulation of a repository, but it is not the first thing that
we want a new user to see because it is lacking context.
What exactly am I going to do here?
Should I install squeeze?
One of the msp-xx?
Both?
What do you mean by "squeeze"? Debian's squeeze distribution?
Commands such as
sudo echo "deb
http://tinyprod.net/repos/debian squeeze main" >> tinyprod-debian.list
will fail because the redirection is outside of scope of the sudo.
The security key needs to be installed prior to step 3, but it
appears afterwards.
=======
The second installation process I would like to go through as an
example is "Installing from source". The first
problem is that
this process skips the compilers (toolchain) altogether. So either we call it
“getting
the TinyOS source code”, “connecting to the TinyOS git repository”, etc.; or if
it is Installing from source, then lets
include the compilers. Suppose that we
install the compilers as described in http://tinyprod.net/debian-dev/ and we
are now ready for the prerequisites section.
There are a number of issues in the prerequisites section (some
relevant if one starts from a fresh instance of Ubuntu, other are generally
relevant):
· automake is available in a few versions, the newest one is not
compatible with TinyOS make system, and programmers being programmers will
almost always choose the latest version. If they do, make will fail. We need to
either fix this incompatability, or tell the user to choose automake with no
version number appended to the package name.
· The emacs package does not exist. Choosing emacs24 worked, I did
not try but others and they may work as well.
The following packages will also be needed
sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install
openjdk-7-jdk //
needed to compile nesC
sudo apt-get install
g++ //
needed to compile TinyOS
After clowning the code, in both
nesC and TinyOS sections the make install command need to be proceeded
with sudo or it will fail.
The make command will fail if any
of this is tried on Ubunto 13.x 64 bit. Once the comments in this email are
taken into considerations both installation processes will work on Ubuntu 12.x
32 bit. The Automatic installation will also work on Ubunto 13.x 64 bit.
Rahav Dor
On Friday, January 10, 2014 11:00 AM, Philip Levis <[email protected]> wrote:
Generally speaking, and I'm a bit biased, the TinyOS code is much more solid
and efficient. But you're right that Contiki has a more active developer
community. The TinyOS code that's there is rock solid, but our user-facing side
could be better. Also, more active development on MCU and RFIC advances would
be great.
I'm interested in the comment that following the installation instructions
doesn't work; I had a student start playing with TinyOS and he said he was
startled at how trivial and easy it was to get up and running.
Phil
-------
Philip Levis
Associate Professor
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
http://csl.stanford.edu/~pal
On Jan 9, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Rahav Dor (yahoo) <[email protected]> wrote:
> I tend to agree with your comment, but leaving outside the kind of support
> requests you mentioned, I still have hopes for TinyOS. Right now it does not
> feel as a vibrant, active community. On top of that our public facing
> information is often incorrect or incomplete, just try to install it by
> following TinyOS web site and see where it would get you.
>
> I believe that our work products should be usable by others. With the
> potential of all-things-embedded, or Internet of Things, or whatever you want
> to call it, TinyOS will not be successful if we forget this.
>
> Rahav Dor
>
>
> On Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:12 AM, Saeid Yazdani <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> TinyOS is not ment to have support. A researcher at least in the case of
> embedded systems or WSN PhD position should not need any support...I see many
> people here who are researchers and they don't know basic C programming.
> I agree that support is a good thing but people shouldn't relay on others to
> cut out the work for them. Kust y thoughts...
> On 9 Jan 2014 16:04, "Rahav Dor (yahoo)" <[email protected]> wrote:
> You should also consider support. I've been using TinyOS for research
> purposes for a while and I can tell you that it seems like a dying product.
> Or at least one, that not too many people care about. It takes days if not
> longer to get a response on this forum.
>
> I do not know how Contiki is doing in this respect, but if this continues,
> the my current project is going to be the last on TinyOS.
>
> Rahav Dor
>
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