Example-Shell Guide

From ContikiWiki

TODO: Cross-check for contiki 2.5 release

The following is an extract from the Contiki tutorial given at the ACM/IEEE conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) in April 2009.

[edit] Contiki Mote Shell

The Contiki shell is an interactive on-mote shell that provides a set of commands for interacting with the system. The shell can be accessed either over a serial USB connection or over a network using Telnet. In this tutorial, we first run the shell over a USB serial connection.

First, compile and upload the shell:

 cd
 cd contiki/examples/sky-shell
 make sky-shell.upload

For 2.x Verion do this:

 cd
 cd contiki-2.x
 cd examples
 cd sky-shell
 make sky-shell.upload

Wait for the compilation and uploading to finish. To connect to the shell over the USB port, run:

 make login

Press the return key to get a prompt. (We have found that with Instant Contiki running in VMWare, garbage characters are sometimes printed out when connecting. They can be safely ignored.) Next, we try a few shell commands. To get a list of available commands, run:

 help

Try a bunch of other commands:

 help
 sense | senseconv
 power | powerconv
 ls
 format
 echo test | write file
 ls
 read file
 nodeid
 blink 10
 reboot
 repeat 2 2 { echo again } &
 ps

The power command prints out the current power profile from Contiki's software-based power profiler. To print out the power profile in decimal digits, run:

 power | binprint

The output will look something like: 12 236 0 37421 0 4 0 380 0 0 0 380 0

The numbers that the power command outputs are:

1. The number of data items that follow, to make automatic parsing of the output easier
2. CPU low-power mode time, least significant 16 bits
3. CPU low-power mode time, most significant 16 bits
4. CPU active mode time, least significant 16 bits
5. CPU active mode time, most significant 16 bits
6. Radio transmission time, least significant 16 bits
7. Radio transmission time, most significant 16 bits
8. Radio listen time, least significant 16 bits
9. Radio listen time, most significant 16 bits
10. Radio transmission time in idle listening, least significant 16 bits
11. Radio transmission time in idle listening, most significant 16 bits
12. Radio listen time in idle listening, least significant 16 bits
13. Radio listen time in idle listening, most significant 16 bits

The output of the power command can be used to compute an estimate of the mote's power consumption by multiplying the time with pre-measured current draw metrics [11]. Because the power command only measures the time during which the peripherals are switched on, the power consumption estimate is not affected by environmental noise such as temperature differences nor by noise due to subtle differences between different versions of hardware.