contiki-launchpad

When I was looking to experiment with Contiki I realized that most of the supported micro controllers are a lot more powerful than an Arduino or something comparable, and a lot more expensive for a development board. There are some ports to low cost hardware - the arduino port for atmel chips [1] and a port to the TI launchpad [2], which is a $3 chip. https://github.com/contiki/contiki-arduino https://github.com/msloth/contiki-launchpad

While it can't use an external xtal, it still has an internal crystal oscillator which can clock it at some MHz, up 16 MHz I think. It's not as accurate but cheaper and more flexible. I did a port of the Contiki OS to the Launchpad, which now comes with the msp430g2452 (16kB flash/256 B RAM) and the 'g2553 (16/512). At home I have them using cc2500-radios (2$ modules from aliexpress) and a radio duty cycling protocol I wrote, with plenty of flash space left for user applications. You can find the port at https://github.com/msloth/contiki-launchpad and a write-up at http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/contiki-for-ti-msp4... and http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/simple-yet-efficien... with lots of measurements and other crowd pleasers.

Yeah, I like the Launchpads. I ported Contiki to them, and wrote some stuff for eg low-power wireless networking. Unfortunately had to rip out stuff like uIP. Check this post for an in-depth write-up of a low-power radio duty cycling protocol, with lots of measurements etc. http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/simple-yet-efficien... For those not interested in Contiki, late in the post there are some power consumption measurements that illustrate rather clearly why switching off the 60 mW radio as much as possible is a must as soon as you go battery. You can find the Contiki-port at https://github.com/msloth/contiki-launchpad