Preparing environment for TinyOS

On a lab computer use a virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04. On your personal laptop you can follow another approach (native installation, lxc/lxd, …) but it may be a good idea to start with VirtualBox too.

The following instructions assume the virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04 setup.

Virtual machine

Install VirtualBox (already done in the lab). Install Virtualbox Extension Pack (already done in the lab). Add your user to the vboxusers group (already done in the lab):

sudo gpasswd -a <your-user> vboxusers

As an OS use Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit. For a virtual machine you can choose Lubuntu 16.04 – a lightweight flavor of Ubuntu.

Configure 2048 MB of RAM, 6-8 GB of dynamically allocated virtual hard disk.

Install the OS by setting the downloaded .iso file as the machine’s optical drive.

When the installation succeeds, install Guest Additions in the guest to gain a better user experience.

TinyOS toolchain and sources

Follow instructions from http://tinyos.stanford.edu/tinyos-wiki/index.php/Automatic_installation. When installing the toolchain (step 1) choose nesc, tinyos-tools (not tinyos-tools-devel) and msp430-46 packages. You can also manually download and install these packages (see Manually installing TinyOS packages) if the website http://tinyprod.net/repos/debian/ doesn’t work smoothly. When setting environment variables (step 3) choose to modify .bashrc.

Apply (manually) this patch to /usr/bin/tos-bsl.

Verify that it works by building a simple TinyOS app:

cd ./tinyos-main/apps/Blink/
make telosb

IDE/editor

TinyOS apps are written using nesC progamming language. Check whether your favourite IDE/editor supports it.