I am looking forward to build a zigbee home automation system for which i require a zigbee module and its SDK. Atmel is one of the few vendors that provides SDK for download.
Could you please tell if Atmel kit AT256RFR2-EK that acts as a wireless node in Zigbee networks worth its huge price?
This site is intended for programming-related questions, and not for making recommendations on toolkits or libraries. I'm really not sure where you'd go for reviews of the various ZigBee radio manufacturers.
If you want to do ZigBee HA, buy commercial products and integrate them. The dev kits are targeting companies planning to build large volumes of product, and the up front cost of the dev kit is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware and software engineering costs.
If you're a hobbyist looking to tinker, just get some XBee modules and build a proprietary network.
Related
On macOS, we've got LightBlue, among others. Are there any solutions for Windows which allow us to debug / reverse engineer / explorer GATT Profiles?
Yes, two options that I've used in the past :
Nordic Semiconductor Master Control Panel for PC
(You will need an nRF51 development kit or USB dongle to use this). The application can be found under the Downloads -> PC software section in the link I listed above.
Use the Silicon Labs (Bluegiga) BLED112 dongle along with the BLEGUI application included with the SDK which is available to download at Silicon Labs' BLED112 website.
Both of these Windows applications will allow you to discover BLE peripherals and connect and query their GATT.
In the ARM world vendors supply their own BSPs to initialize board peripherals. Intel boards that you buy on the market all seems to come with some version of BIOS. Does BIOS do thing that BSPs cannot do? What if some hobbyist or engineer wants to do development using Intel processors but do not want anything to do with the BIOS? Why restrict programming with a layer of firmware that programmers have no source access to?
Typically the BIOS is no layer of firmware but rather the firmware to boot the system. After booting control is provided by the OS such as Windows or Linux.
This is not really my area, but ....
The initials BSP are heavily overloaded. It appears you mean board support package and not Boot-strap-processor or one of the other computer related terms that use those initials.
It is my understanding that BSP's (board support packages) are primarily used for embedded systems and indeed, when I did a web search on 'Intel bsp', most of the hits were discussing Intel Galileo and Intel Edison boards, which are targeted toward IoT (internet of things) projects and other embedded projects. But I also found BSP's, for sale and for free, in executable and in source form, for a wide variety of Intel boards. If you are working with Linux, you might want to check out https://www.yoctoproject.org/ .
I don't know if there are any vendors packaging a BSP with an Intel board, but it is certainly possible.
The only open source boot firmware for Intel processors that I know of is coreboot. It doesn't support every board. If you are building your own board, then you could customize it to work with your design. A typical modern BIOS has lots of bloat such as ACPI and UEFI that you may or may not want.
I am a non technical person and trying hands on making devices. i have one stupid question. I want to know, is micro-controller development kit can program unlimited microcontrollers (programming will be same for all micro-controller) or we need separate micro controller development kit and separate microcontroller in every device?
You have to read the license for the tool when you buy it, some yes, some no. Often you dont use the developers kit to program the parts, you use a programming tool (which may or may not be part of the same kit) for production. Some tools will program different vendors parts or all the parts within a vendors product list, but in general that is not the case. depending on the device there are a lot of free tools (avrdude for example) that dont have restrictions, but it is vendor/chip specific as to what tool will work for the microcontroller in question.
Simply read the docs on the tool you are interested in to see what it does and doesnt support, read the license agreement to see if there is a limit on the number of devices per software license.
Each type of micro-controller will have its own development kit. That kit works with all the same or similar micro-controllers. But, you will need separate micro-controller for each device.
There are plenty of coffeemakers and washing machines with a microcontroller in them. And clearly the manufacturers of those don't buy microcontroller dev kits by the billions. That would be unaffordable.
I wonder is it possible to implement new features in existing bios, in other words is there some libraries (like sdk) of motherboard which give you chance to make easy your own bios?
What mean "supported motherboard" - is that include libraries for developing or just mean that you can download latest update if exist?
To be more specific i will like to make in bios feature to wake up my computer if it's off at specific time. My motherboard is asrock. Do i have chance for develop my own timer features, or just can wait for product developer and pray that they make those feature?
Generally, the answer is "no". Most motherboard manufacturers license the BIOS source code from Phoenix/AMI/Insyde, and then tailor it to their specific motherboard implementation. The BIOS gets compiled to a binary, it is loaded into the motherboard flash chip, and that's it.
To modify the BIOS, you would need access to the BIOS source code. The motherboard manufacturer is unlikely to give that to you (they are probably under NDA). You could license the original source code from the BIOS vendor, but that is quite expensive (typically tens of thousands of $$$). Also, the source code from the BIOS vendor will be missing any motherboard-specific customizations.
Now, with the introduction of newer UEFI-based BIOSes, they have gotten a lot more extensible and standardized between vendors. It is now possible to develop pre-boot applications that live in the flash chip alongside the BIOS. However, the timer feature you are looking to implement is rather low-level, so this does not help you.
Is there an existing ZigBee Library/Stack that is comaptible with MikroC? I am planning to use MRF24J40B from Microchip as the transceiver and PIC18F27J53 Microcontroller as ZigBee stack controller. I can't seem to find a ZigBee stack compatible with MikroC. Though Microchip has a ZigBee stack provided, it happened that MikroC is not a supported compiler.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Unless you think you can port Microchip's ZigBee stack from their compiler to mikroC, you should consider using their development environment for building your application.
In my experience with embedded development, you're better off using the hardware company's tools, especially if you intend to use their code libraries.
If you think there's benefit to using mikroC over Microchip's tools, then you should contact your sales rep there and ask about it. If you can present a strong argument for the benefits of using mikroC, and convince them that you'll be purchasing a large number of chips once you have a shipping product, they might be able to help you with getting it to work with that compiler.