Tock Logo

Talking Tock

Talking Tock 31

Baby's first GitHub org, networking and ports

This is the 31st post in a series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

  1. Virtualizing Bluetooth Low Energy Advertisements
  2. Designing a Network Stack for 6lowpan
  3. Tock’s Own GitHub organization
  4. Porting to new chips and boards
    1. STM32 & Discovery Boards
    2. Teensy
  5. RFCs
  6. Pull Requests
    1. Merged
    2. Proposed

Virtualizing Bluetooth Low Energy Advertisements

@niklasad1 wrote about his recent pull request adding a BLE advertising system call interface for the nRF5x microcontrollers. Read here about how Tock now supports several processes advertising as completely different BLE devices on the same radio.

Designing a Network Stack for 6lowpan

@hudson-ayers led an effort to write design document laying out how we should build the Tock networking stack to support Thread and other 6lowpan-based networks. The document is now merged into master, and work is ongoing to implement it. Check out the document here for a good description of 6lowpan and an interesting overview of how to design a flexible framework for it.

Tock’s Own GitHub organization

We’ll slowly be migrating Tock-related repositories from the helena-project GitHub organization to a new tock GitHub organization. We hope this will make various Tock-related projects (e.g. the bootloader, out-of-tree ports) more discoverable. It also gives us a bit more flexibility to give administrative access to contributors who probably don’t belong in same GitHub organization we post all of our academic paper rejections.

For a bit of history, Tock had its beginning as an ambitious but modest collaborative project between students and faculty at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and University of Michigan, that collaborates on a handful of different Internet of Things related projects. For the purposes of a mailing list name, we dubbed our group Helena Project, and created a GitHub org where our projects lived, including Tock. It’s time to graduate the Tock project and recognize that it’s one with a community outside our little research group.

Porting to new chips and boards

In the last couple months a few separate efforts have emerged to port Tock to new chips and boards. We’re all very excited about these efforts and want to help support them as best we can.

We need to figure out if the best way for these efforts to happen is in the main tree, in which case we need to get our hands on all of this hardware and set up more rigorous testing for the core repository, or out-of-tree, in hardware specific repositories.

STM32 & Discovery Boards

The STM32 series of microcontrollers is a pretty popular choice. @george-hopkins ported Tock to the STM32F1 sub-family, (#686). Others have since either added to this effort or done their own ports for different sub-families.

While STM32 is a good candidate for a main family of chips to support, it has its own complexities: sub-families have different overlapping hardware interfaces in common, some chips have features Tock relies on (i.e. the MPU), while others don’t. There also isn’t a single board that’s representative of the whole family, so it’s not clear which one we would go with off-the-bat.

For now it seems like the best way to not leave code in pull requests without having answers straight away to all these questions is to setup an independent repository that will host the ports.

Teensy

@shaneleonard wrote a port for the Teensy 3.6 to help teach an embedded systems class at Stanford.

RFCs

Pull Requests

Merged

Proposed