My place to share some bits and bytes

The title says it all. I just released the first dfu-util release to the public. Please test it and package it for your distro. :)

We are making good progress towards a first release of dfu-util. Harald was kind enough to prepare a subdomain for it under gnumonks.org and I already setup a simple website, a git repo with the complete svn history imported and pushed out a release candidate for 0.1.

If no show-stopper crosses my way I will make the release Sunday 2010-05-23. Once this is done I will try to make sure that this release replaces the various svn snapshots distros have already packaged while waiting for a real release.

This is of course only the first step. On my agenda is better support for other hardware, more DFU 1.0 compliance and support for the changes from DFU 1.1. Next to this improvements I'm also thinking about the ecosystem around DFU on embedded linux systems. Getting the DFU u-boot patches fixed and merged would be a nice target as well. Be warned though that this will progress slowly as it is just one of my spare time projects and has to compete with others.

Until recently I had not much interest to play with the low-rate wireless personal area networks, thats what the formal description of 802.15.4 is. Often it is also referenced as ZigBee, but while Zigbee is based on it it adds some more layers on top which I'm not going to play with.

The main reason why I so far had not much interest in 802.15.4 is that it was almost always used in small micro-controller based systems. While I understand that for low power consumption products like sensor network nodes it is the right approach I never felt like I would enjoy to work on such systems.

In my study thesis I'm doing right now I have to get delay tolerant networking working over a 802.15.4 link. For this I'm using a setup with two iMote2 boards which are based on a powerful PXA27x SoC and are able to run linux. The linux port of the board was already in a really good shape and already included in the mainline kernel which gave me a good base to work from.

On the board is a Chipcon CC2420 802.15.4 RF transceiver which connected over SPI with some additional GPIO and IRQ lines. The linux kernel already is prepared with a 802.15.4 stack and luckily there was already posted a driver for the cc2420 which I had to bug fix it a bit over the last weeks. All my changes are already in, or on the way to, the linux zigbee tree which contains the mac802154 layer for the driver. This layer had not made its way upstream yet, but I hope that will happen within the next 2 or 3 release cycles. Next step on my agenda is to make it work with ibrdtn.