Contiki Shell

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Introduction

The Contiki Shell is an interactive on-mote UNIX-­style shell that allows for text‐based interaction with a sensor node or a network of sensor nodes through a set of commands that can be executed on a UNIX like command line terminal. It has features such as piping data, run in background, file system interaction, network commands, sensor measurement commands and system commands. The shell can be accessed either over a serial USB connection or over a network using Telnet. In this tutorial, we will run the shell over a USB serial connection.

Below are the various instances of shells provided in Contiki:

1) example-shell: This shell can be compiled only for the native target, but not on Tmote Sky due to the firmware image size limitation on the Tmote Sky.

2) sky-shell: This shell is a thinned out version, which can be compiled on Tmote Sky nodes, allowing the firmware image to fit the Tmote Sky memory.

3) sky-shell-exec: This shell is a further thinned out version and has features such as the exec command allowing to load and execute ELF files.

4) sky-shell-webserver: This is a shell that features the command sky-all-data, allowing to collect different sensor measurements and network statistics from a Tmote Sky mote.

In this tutorial we will focus on the Contiki Serial Shell.

Objective

At the end of this tutorial, goal is to make you at ease with the Contiki shell.

I fell in love with Contiki Shell, I hope at the end you will too :)

You will learn

In this tutorial you will learn about the following topics:

1) How to get a Contiki Serial Shell up and running on Tmote sky nodes.

2) Various Contiki Shell Commands, their usage and Contiki shell programming.

3) How to create your own Shell Commands.

4) How to create your own Shell for Contiki through an example project.

5) You get to execute various fun examples and understand the Contiki shell along the way.

6) Last, but not least, where all the source code for Contiki is located and a code walkthrough.

Sounds exciting ? Game for it ? Let's begin then!