A document on how e-motes are used in the testbed.

www/doc/emotes.html

+<!--
+   EMULAB-COPYRIGHT
+   Copyright (c) 2005 University of Utah and the Flux Group.
+   All rights reserved.
+  -->
+<center>
+    <h1>Motes on E-Motes</h1>
+</center>
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<ul>
+<li> <a href="#INTRO">Introduction</a>
+<li> <a href="#HARDWARE">Hardware</a>
+<li> <a href="#SPECIFICATION">Specification in NS Files</a>
+<li> <a href="#PROGRAMMING">Programming Motes</a>
+<li> <a href="#SERIAL">Serial Consoles</a>
+</ul>
+
+<hr>
+
+<ul>
+<li> <a NAME="INTRO"></a>
+<h3>Introduction</h3>
+
+The <a href="/tutorial/mobilewireless.php3">mobile wireless testbed</a>
+includes two static nodes hosted on
+<a href="http://www.xbow.com/Products/productsdetails.aspx?sid=90">E-Mote</a>
+Ethernet gateways.  This document describes how these devices fit into the
+larger Emulab system.
+
+<li> <a NAME="HARDWARE"></a>
+<h3>Hardware</h3>
+
+The static motes in Utah's emulab are hosted on E-Motes.  E-Motes (also known
+as the MIB600CA) from <a href="http://www.xbow.com/">Crossbow</a> provide three
+key features:
+
+<ol>
+    <li>They have a power supply that comes from the power grid, so there is no
+    need to worry about battery life on the attached mote.</li>
+
+    <li>They provide the ability to reprogram the attached mote over Ethernet -
+    thus you don't need to worry about wedging your motes, we can simply
+    reprogram them to recover them to a known state.</li>
+
+    <li>They export the mote's serial console to a TCP port. This opens up
+    several possibilities. First, it means that you can use any of them as base
+    stations to gateway between the Internet and your mote network.  Second, it
+    provides a back channel over which to send commands to the motes or extract
+    data from them.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+The overall goal of the second two features for us is to provide something
+analogous to our PCs'
+<a href="/tutorial/docwrapper.php3?docname=tutorial.html#ControlNet">control
+network</a>.
+
+<li> <a NAME="SPECIFICATION"></a>
+    <h3>Specification in NS Files</h3>
+
+Since motes in Emulab are hosted on other nodes such as E-Motes and Stargates,
+you must specify two nodes in your NS file: the mote itself and its host. A
+mote specification in your NS file may look something like this:
+<blockquote style="border-style:solid; border-color:#bbbbbb; border-width: thin">
+<pre>
+set inky       [$ns node]
+set inkyhost   [$ns node]
+
+tb-set-hardware $inky     mica2
+tb-set-hardware $inkyhost motehost
+tb-fix-node     $inky     $inkyhost
+
+tb-set-node-os  $inky   TinyOS-CntRfm
+</pre> 
+</blockquote>
+
+This code asks for a Mica2 mote, which we name <code>inky</code>, and places it
+on a host called <code>inkyhost</code>. By giving the generic type
+<code>motehost</code>, we are saying that we don't care what this mote is
+attached to. If we wanted an e-Mote, we could have set the type to
+<code>emote</code>, or <code>garcia</code> if we wanted it hosted on a robot.
+
+The <code>tb-set-node-os</code> command sets the image to be loaded on the node
+- we'll cover that in the next section.
+
+If you want to get a specific mote, use the <code>tb-fix-node</code> to fix the
+mote's host. For example, if we wanted to put <code>inkyhost</code> on the
+emote named <code>em1</code>, we would use <code>tb-fix-node $inkyhost em1</code>.
+
+<li> <a NAME="PROGRAMMING"></a>
+    <h3>Programming Motes</h3>
+<p>
+Uploading your own code to run on the motes is easy. Just build your TinyOS app
+normally (ie. '<code>make mica2</code>').  Then, upload the binary that gets
+placed in <code>build/mica2/main.srec</code> to our
+<a href="<?php echo $TBBASE ?>/newimageid_ez.php3?nodetype=mote">mote image
+    creation page</a>.  This page will ask you for a 'descriptor'.  This
+descriptor can then be used in <code>tb-set-node-os</code> lines in your
+NS files, and your app will be automatically loaded on the appropriate mote(s).
+
+<p>
+At this time, we don't have a TinyOS installation on the Emulab servers, so
+you'll need to have a TinyOS installation to build from on your desktop
+machine, or some other machine you control.  We hope to provide a way for you
+build TinyOS apps on Emulab in the near future.  Also, at the current time, all
+of our motes have radios in the 900MHz band, so see the TinyOS
+<a href="http://www.tinyos.net/tinyos-1.x/doc/mica2radio/CC1000.html">CC1000
+radio document</a> to make sure you're tuning the radios to the right band.
+
+<p>
+When you inevitably make changes to your code, you can simply place the new
+kernel in the path that was automatically constructed for you by the image
+creation page; the next time you use that OS in an NS file, the new version
+will be loaded. If you'd like to load your node code onto your motes without
+starting a new experiment, you have two options:
+<ul>
+  <li> <code>os_load</code> allows you to load an kernel that has already been
+     defined as an image, as above. You give it the image descriptor with its
+     <code>-i</code> argument, and you can either give the physical names of all
+     motes you want to reload, or a <code>-e pid,eid</code> argument to reload
+     all nodes in the given experiment.
+  <li> <code>tbuisp</code> allows you to load a file directly onto your motes
+     without having to register it as an image. This can be a quick way to do
+     development/debugging. Just pass it the operation <code>upload</code>, the
+     path to the file you wish to load, and the physical names of your motes.
+</ul>
+Both of these are commands in /usr/testbed/bin on ops.emulab.net.   They are
+also available through our
+<a href="<?php echo $TBBASE ?>/xmlrpcapi.php3">XML-RPC interface</a>, so you
+can run them from your desktop machine to save time - the file given as an
+argument to tbuisp is sent with the XML-RPC, so you don't need to copy it onto
+our servers.
+    
+<li> <a NAME="SERIAL"></a>
+     <h3>Serial Consoles</h3>
+
+The serial consoles on your motes can be reached by connecting to TCP port
+10002 of the E-Mote. You can do this, for example, with <code>telnet</code>, or
+with the TinyOS SerialForwarder program. The E-Mote is configured to talk to
+the mote at 57600 baud.
+
+
+</ul>