kb1lqc
commented
6 years ago RIOT-OS
RIOT-OS failed to work out because we could not program a radio easily in Linux where RIOT-OS is compiled. It's possible to compile in Linux and program on Windows but this is a slow development process and we still need to develop radio control firmware. Solutions for Linux would be to write a new TI BSL in C. Python libraries with existing libFTDI libraries has a bug that prevents proper use of CBUS lines when programming. We unfortunately use CBUS lines to toggle BSL mode on the CC430.
SimpliciTI
Texas Instruments licensing is a bit weird and it's unclear that we actually can easily use this for Faraday as an open source project even in TI's source code is available. RF protocol is possibly proprietary however it is openly specified. We would still need to command radio from scratch. It's unclear if a full IP packet can easily be sent over the protocol. A lot of the hard work is done for us however.
TI-RTOS
To our understanding it's pretty big but could work. There is potentially a compile code size limitation workaround using GNU compilers and even then any programming needs to be done in Windows to get debugging/JTAG installation.
Contiki
This is a whole project in itself. It appears to not fit on the CC430 and is not really ported to it.
FreeRTOS
This could work though Google searches show that one barely fits FreeRTOS onto the CC430 with most functionality disabled. Then we still need to implement the radio.
Bare Metal
This is looking nice again. Bluntly, we are limited by the CC430 and it's becoming an issue. We in the end need a extremely simple way of passing bytes around over RF and connecting the radios to pass IP traffic. Achieve usefulness and possibly improve hardware to open up our ability to leverage an actual OS such as Linux. This figure hardware may not be backwards compatible but we don't know and can't stop ourselves from moving forward now.
Possible Firmware Options
RIOT-OS