Some months ago the Thingsquare folks hosted a contest to help spreading the world abouth Thingsquare and their wireless mesh networking and connectivity solution to the Internet of Things (see chached details about the contest here)... well, luckily I was one of the winners of the The Thingsquare IoT Kit (a limited edition unavailable now), featuring:
- USB cables.
- Ethernet cable.
- SmartRF06 evaluation boards, featuring a LCD, buttons and plenty of test points, with on-board accelerometer, light sensor and UART back-channel over USB.
- Radio System on a Chip (SoC) boards(TI CC2538-based), featuring an ARM Cortex M3-based MCU system with 32K RAM, 512 KB flash, alongside a 2.4GHz radio transceiver, IEEE 802.15.4 compatible.
- An Olimex MOD-ENC28J60-based Ethernet connectivity router.
- Login credentials for the Thingsquare server.
- Cool stickers!.
Running on top of Contiki operative system of course.
Here it is after unboxing:
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| Thingsquare's IoT kit unboxed |
The setup was quite straight-forward:
Just assemble the Router-labeled node together, bundling the ethernet board onto the intermediate assembly board, on top of the SmartRF06 board (quite a sandwich there), and plug-in the CC2538EM with the router label. Once the router was assembled I only had to connect it to one of my router's free LAN port through the provided ethernet cable, power the evaluation board through the uUSB port (be sure to enable powering via USB by moving the SOURCE switch to USB, and to place the jumper to connect VDD and EB power pins on the SoC board).
After powering the board, a green LED next to the ethernet board should lit up and the yellow one will start blinking, another green LED on the board will start blinking until obtaining an IPv4 address from the router, the it will stop blinking... I did not catch this at first (an engineers motto taken from Tropic Thunder: we don't read manuals, manuals read us!), I was expecting "something" to show up on the LED display but no feedback there (I was tempted to replace the board's display to discard a broken unit), but as I was already on my routers box management utility, I found the assigned IP address given by the DHCP server, and test connectivity to the board with an extended ping.
To assemble the remaining nodes just plug in the SoC boards on top of the SmartRF06 boards, and power as above.
A quick photo of both nodes back-to-back is show below:
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| Router and device back-to-back |
The nodes will display the follow progress messages over the LCD display:
Waiting for wireless network
Waiting for Internet DNS
Waiting for server connection
Register PIN ##### at thingsquare.com
If everything goes well then you should get a PIN number for each node (except the Router).
Registering the device is quite simple, at the Thingsquare's demo page just register the device and name it, the node's LED display will be updated quickly afterwards, in case you are wondering mine's Luffy (you can expect the rest of the tripulation to jump in anytime):
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| The node registered and ready |
The demo has some cool stuff, what I liked the most was to actual develop code on the web browser and then remotely compile and flash the node, allowing to pause/continue the device after being programmed, and commanding the device to blink on request to assert it is running, simple but always useful, specially when introducing people to the IoT world and needing to show some real hardware doing wireless "stuff" (do not under appreciate the commercial power of a blinking LED!).
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| Thingsquare browser-based IDE |
The setup was simply enough to have it ready in 5 minutes, the demo page is very straight-forward to follow and the code examples and shown features briefly show the capabilities and possibilities of the system, below are some cool examples of a sensor metering system and an intelligent street lighting deployment.
The development kit is quite complete and it was a great addition to my collection: TI evaluation boards are well suited for testing, prototyping and the TI CC2538 support on Contiki is coming along just great, and as Thingsquare actively contributes to Contiki (heck, the CEO is Adam Dunkels), one can expect nodes and products based on this SoC to be a popular choice amongst developers.
I will continue testing, I missed to take some wireshark pcap screenshots, so hopefully I will update this anytime soon.
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