Dresden Elektronik Radio Modules

The purpose of this wiki is to provide documentation about Dresden Elektronik 6LoWPAN radio / MCU modules and all hardware and software solutions related to them, including the MAC / 6LoWPAN stack. By providing explanations, tutorials, and proven solutions to some of the more common problems that one may encounter while working with these modules, hopefully the wiki is able to speed up the development process as the reader do not have to repeat other people's mistakes.

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Description of the Hardware Setting up Development Environment Using the MAC / 6LoWPAN stack

GNU/Linux related material Known problems/bugs and Workarounds

Setting up Working Environment

Dresden Elektronik radio modules are designed to work with a special software stack developed by Dresden Elektronik and Atmel. In order to use this stack, the working environment and the toolchain need to be configured properly.

This section tries to provide some information on how to set up the environment in order to work with the modules.

Setting up Toolchain

In order to work with the modules, two toolchains are needed - one for compiling and flashing AVR modules and one for ARM modules.

AVR

The AVR toolchain consists of following components:

• avr-binutils: linker, assembler, etc for the AVR platform
• avr-gcc: the GNU C cross-compiler for the AVR platform
• avr-libc: C libraries and header files for the AVR platform
• avrdude: for uploading the code to the chip

Microsoft Windows

In Windows installing of the AVR toolchain is quite easy. All that is needed is to download and install WinAVR (or Atmel Studio).

Note: Atmel stopped developing WinAVR as a separate entity in 2010 and it is now distributed as a component of the Atmel Studio package. Although the last (2010) seperate version is still available for download, it does not support the newer ATmega256RFR2 controller. For users who do not want to download and install the entire Atmel Studio package, a newer, seperate WinAVR, extracted from the Atmel Studio package is available here.

Setting up IDE

The recommended IDE for usage with the Dresden Elektronik software stack is Eclipse for C/C++ Developers. It can be downloaded for free from here.

After installing Eclipse, a new project containing the Dresden Elektronik communication stack can be created by following the next steps:

1. File -> New -> Makefile Project with Existing Code
2. For Existing Code Location, select the path to the toplevel folder of the stack, leave other settings to default and click Finish.