May 4

6LoWPAN and AVR

Category: System Architecture

Freaklabs says that “Arch Rock’s 6LoWPAN stack is now available on the Atmel RZRAVEN board which has the Atmel AT86RF230 802.15.4 MAC on it. The 6LoWPAN stack is available as a binary image for the board and has TCP and UDP services which are accessible via a PC.”

Does this mean that someone has indeed merged the two types of stacks? Well, the app notes say that this approach does indeed eliminate the need for two protocols. But, I don’t see any way to buy this, or design it into a product. Demo only, as far as I can see.

4 comments

4 Comments so far

  1. Zach Shelby May 5th, 2008 11:41 pm

    You might want to check out the 6lowpan stack solution from Sensinode. There is an open-source version of the Sensinode stack available on SourceForge

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/nanostack

    and Sensinode also licenses a commercial version for product design-in http://www.sensinode.com. Yes, 6lowpan stacks usually include an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, this is the case with NanoStack. You can also port NanoStack to an AVR+AT86RF230 platform quite easily although the main supported platforms are MSP430+CC2420 and CC2430.

  2. Akiba May 19th, 2008 4:42 am

    Nice site! Most likely, the Arch Rock stack was ported to the RZRaven board since it already contains a 802.15.4 radio and an AVR MCU. I don’t think they merged the two stacks since there’s no need to. The RZRaven dev board can run either stack exclusively.

    The problem is that since Atmel doesn’t make their own software, if you want to use their chips, you’ll probably have to cut a separate software licensing deal with Arch Rock which would probably be a pain in the ass. Back in 2006, a Zigbee software license from Figure8 Wireless was about $90k. I suspect an Arch Rock license, while maybe not as expensive, will probably be out of the reach of most small projects. If you’re interested in 6LoWPAN, you should check out the nanostack from Sensinode.

  3. Akiba May 19th, 2008 4:42 am

    Oh, I see the nanostack was already mentioned above. ha ha ha. My bad.

  4. brucecannon May 19th, 2008 8:14 am

    Thanks for the comments, Akiba. Zach and Paul have also pointed me to the nanostack. I don’t think it’s plug and play enough for my project, but I’m taking a closer look at it.

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