DIVISION OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CS 263. Modern Distributed Systems:
Wireless Communications and Sensor Networks

Prof. Matt Welsh
Fall 2005

Telos Installation Instructions
Bor-rong Chen

General Documentation

These documents may be helpful if you get stuck:

Setting up a Telos environment on Windows

  1. Download and install TinyOS v1.1.11 package available here.

  2. Start up Cygwin.

  3. Plug the Telos mote into a USB port on your PC. When Windows is asks for its driver, it's available here.

  4. Type "motelist" under cygwin to see if the Telos mote is detected by the system. If it is working correctly, you will see something like this:
    $ motelist
    Reference  CommPort   Description
    ---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------
    M4BQY1WI   COM3       Telos (Rev A 2004-04-27)
    

  5. Upgrade TinyOS to v1.1.14 as described here.
    Make sure you type this to install the rpm:
    rpm --force --ignoreos -Uvh tinyos-1.1.14Jul2005cvs-1.cygwin.noarch.rpm
    

Setting up a Telos environment on Linux (RedHat or Fedora Core)

  1. You must have GNU make v3.80 or later installed. Type make -v to check which version you have.

  2. Download and install Sun Java J2SE 1.4.2 SDK from this website.

  3. Download and install Sun JavaComm from this website. Apart from what described in the JavaComm documentation, you may need to do this to get the library loaded correctly.
    As root, type:
    cp commapi/lib/libLinuxSerialParallel.so /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_09/jre/lib/i386/
    

  4. Install nesc 1.1.2b available here.

  5. Follow the Linux installation instructions provided here by the TinyOS team, except the Java part.
    Install TinyOS 1.1.0 first and then upgrade to TinyOS 1.1.14.
    Details regarding upgrading can be found here.

  6. Install MSP430 tool chain: where $TOSROOT is the root of your TinyOS installation directory (e.g., /opt/tinyos-1.x).

  7. Make a symlink for the Telos-specific "Boot Strap Loader" for MSP430. As root, type:
    ln -s $TOSROOT/tools/src/mspgcc-pybsl/bsl.py /usr/local/bin/msp430-bsl
    

  8. Install pySerial, available here. As root, type:
        unzip pyserial-2.2.zip
        cd pyserial-2.2
        python setup.py install
    

  9. In order to allow TinyOS java applications to access the USB port, you need to make a symlink that makes the USB serial port look like a "standard" serial port. As root, type:
    ln -sf /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyS1
    
    Where /dev/ttyUSB0 is the USB port where your Telos mote will be connected (/dev/ttyUSB0 should work in most cases). /dev/ttyS1 should be an unused physical serial port. You can pick another number if you want. If you choose /dev/ttyS1, then the Telos mote can be accessed using
    export MOTECOM=serial@/dev/ttyS1:telos
    
    when you run Java applications that talk to the motes serial port. (This is explained in the TinyOS tutorial.)

  10. Set the following environment variable:
    export MAKERULES=/opt/tinyos-1.x/tools/make/Makerules
    
    where /opt/tinyos-1.x is the location of your TinyOS installation directory.