802.15.4 “serial-radio”

Overview

The wpan_serial sample shows how to use hardware with 802.15.4 radio and USB controller as a “serial-radio” device for Contiki-based border routers.

Requirements

The sample assumes that 802.15.4 radio and USB controller are supported on a board. You can pick, for example, a transceiver such as a CC2520 or RF2xx using overlays, or by using an SoC with a built-in radio, such as a kw41z, nrf5, or samr21.

Building and Running

  1. Before building and running this sample, be sure your Linux system’s ModemManager is disabled, otherwise, it can interfere with serial port communication:

    $ sudo systemctl disable ModemManager.service
    
  2. Build the sample Zephyr application to a board with a 802.15.4 radio and USB controller. There are configuration files for various setups in the samples/net/wpan_serial directory:

    • prj.conf This is the standard default config. This can be used by itself for hardware which has native 802.15.4 support.

    To build the wpan_serial sample:

    west build -b <board name> samples/net/wpan_serial -- -DCONF_FILE="prj.conf [overlay-<RADIO>.conf]"
    

    Here’s how to build and flash the sample for the Atmel SAM R21 Xplained Pro Development Kit.

    west build -b samr21_xpro samples/net/wpan_serial
    west flash
    
  3. Connect board to Linux PC, /dev/ttyACM[number] should appear.

  4. Run Contiki-based native border router (6lbr, native-router, etc) Example for Contiki:

    $ cd examples/ipv6/native-border-router
    $ make
    $ sudo ./border-router.native -v5 -s ttyACM0 fd01::1/64
    

Now you have a Contiki native board router. You can access its web-based interface with your browser using the server address printed in the border-router output.

...
Server IPv6 addresses:
 0x62c5c0: =>fd01::212:4b00:531f:113a
...

Use your browser to access http://[fd01::212:4b00:531f:113a]/ and you’ll see available neighbors and routes.

See also

IEEE 802.15.4 and Thread APIs
UART Interface