Building a development environment for Xbow Motes on Gentoo

The quick start installer from Xbow is for Windows. I wanted to configure my Gentoo Linux box as a development environment for writing Mica applications. From looking at the Cygwin environment set up by the Windows installer I knew I needed the tinyos (tos) development packages and the nesC compiler.

On Gentoo all tos stuff is masked as unstable so you can’t just emerge what you need. This is what I did to build the environment:


root@covent src # emerge sys-devel/crossdev
root@covent src # echo "PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage" >> /etc/make.conf
root@covent src # mkdir /usr/local/portage
root@covent src # crossdev --target avr


The final tool is the program to upload applications to the mote. This is called uisp, unfortunately the default version in Gentoo (when I was doing this ‘uisp-20050207-r1′) does not understand how to correctly talk to the serial programming board we have (mib510). From the web:

UISP is the standard AVR In-System Programmer used to copy compiled programs from the PC to the micro controller… Note that the mib510 programmer currently requires a requires a custom version of uisp available in the tools package suppled on the TinyOS website.

I checked out and built the CVS version (web view http://tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net/tinyos/tinyos-1.x/):


mjeg@covent tmp # cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co -P tinyos-1.x
mjeg@covent tmp # cd tinyos-1.x/tools/src/usip
mjeg@covent uisp # ./configure --prefix /usr/local
mjeg@covent uisp # make
mjeg@covent uisp # sudo make install


Update

Aurelien Francillon is maintaining a Portage overlay for tos, you can download it from his website: http://planete.inrialpes.fr/~francill/Stuff.html.