TinyOS Tutorial

Last updated 31 July 2002

Lesson 1: An Introduction to TinyOS
Lesson 1 introduces the major concepts required to program TinyOS applications. These include a description of components, interfaces, commands, and events. The TinyOS programming model is explained. The role of each of the different file types are detailed.

Lesson 2: Event-driven Sensor Acquisition
The TinyOS platform provides primitives to obtain sensing data from tiny networked devices. This lesson details how to build a simple sensing application that records the light exposure on a photo diode.

Lesson 3: Introducing Tasks for Application Data Processing
The roles of both tasks and events are described. This lesson illustrates the use of tasks to process data from the sense application in lesson 2 and events to receive the sensor data and pass it on to the background running task.

Lesson 4: Composing Components to Send and Receive Messages
Lesson 4 introduces basic abstraction to send integers via the RFM radio stack. A counter application is built that sends the current value of the counter over the RF radio.

Lesson 5: Using the TOSSIM Simulator to Develop TinyOS Components
TOSSIM is the TinyOS simulator. Learn how to build, debug, and run components using TOSSIM.

Lesson 6: Displaying Data on a PC
In order to utilize the data from the tiny networked sensors, we must be able to analyze it on the host computer. This lesson provides an example application that graphs the light readings from the sensors over time.

Lesson 7: Broadcasting Packets
Lesson 7 has three components:

Lesson 8: Data Logging Application
The final lesson provides a fairly complete application for remote data logging and collection. It also illustrates a simple multihop data propogation method that allows data to be collected by a central location.

In addition to these basic lessons, several other documents are available:

Hardware Verification
How to verify that your mote hardware is functioning properly.

TinyDB
Getting started with the TinyDB query processing system.

Bombilla
Getting started with Bombilla, the TinyOS virtual machine.

Matlab
Interact with your motes through Matlab.

Naming Conventions
TinyOS Coding and Naming Conventions