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.

Mickey and me gave our talks about Open{Moko,EZX} and presented the community view in discussions.

Besides the different focus the event was also a lot smaller then the ones I usually attend. Around 40 people. So most of the attendees were speaker as well. Mixed up with the fact that many of the people are doing research in this area gave the conference a academic touch.

In the last weeks Mickey and me pondered if we really should attend as our travel and working schedules are pretty full, we did not got plane tickets and had to go two 10 hours train rides, etc.

In the end I'm happy we decided to go. Besides the talks especially the small group of people was a good place for interesting and informative discussions. Coming from the FOSS world and doing not much business besides OpenMoko it was quite interesting for me what people with a more commercial background are doing with mobile devices and what benefits and drawbacks they see in using FOSS for example.

During the days and nights we had some working session with normal OpenMoko stuff but also some hours on catching up with OpenEZX stuff. But that's another blogpost.