Contiki Operating System

Contiki is an operating system which is specially designed for networked embedded systems. It was implemented as a research for the Ph.D thesis of Adam Dunkels at Swedish Institute of Computer Science(SICS). Contiki contains almost all the features that is necessary to develop applications using it for networked embedded systems. Therefore Contiki operating system has became the choice of so many industrial and academic communities for their commercial embedded systems or for educational research works. According to the Contiki developers, Contiki has been deployed in routers, automobile electronic systems and even in satellites.

It includes some specially designed TCP/IP stacks called uIP and lwIP which is not an available feature in most of the other embedded operating systems. Contiki supports dynamic loading and linking for applications. Among all these things, Contiki provides a thread programming model called Proto-threads on top of its event driven kernel. Because of these proto-threads, Contiki programmers can write multithreaded applications without worrying about implementing state machines. This is a very straightforward approach unlike other embedded operating systems.

Contiki operating system has been ported to so many platforms and porting it to newer platforms also seems to be not that hard. Since the major usage of Contiki according to my view is Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN), I will talk a little bit more about WSN platforms. Contiki runs on most of the available sensor network platforms like Sky, ESB, MSB430, Micaz and so on. When working on different wireless sensor network researches like writing WSN applications, implementing new routing protocols etc, we can use Contiki as our operating system abstraction since it provides so many facilities for the programmer rather than writing programs to run directly on hardware.

Writing programs for Contiki is a very easy and intersting task. However you have to have the necessary development tools to compile your program codes. Ok, lets say you have written a code and got the required development tools to compile it. Where will you run it ? You have to have some kind of a wireless sensor board or what we call a mote. If you don't have such a device platform that I have named above, don't worry! You have more options.

The simplest thing to do is to compile your code into native platform which is your PC. Then you can run the program in the command line. But this option has limitations. Most of the peripheral devices that a real WSN mote contains are not available in your PC and therefore you can't try out all the features of Contiki. The only thing you can do on PC is to write a Contiki program to print some thing and run on terminal to see what it prints on terminal. You can't have sensor readings, led blinks and other stuff on your PC.

So, the second option is the most interesting one. You have hardware simulators. You can run your compiled Contiki programs on such a simulator and test just as you run your code on real hardware. Sometimes even if you have real hardware with you, it's better to run your codes first on a simulator for testing and debugging purposes before putting those codes on a real hardware. I hope to write more about WSN hardware simulators and about contiki programming in future posts.