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At the moment I am building a small demo based on the AVR Raven and Contiki. I was running into some trouble with building the Firmwares on my Mac – this is the documentation of the workarounds.

The Contiki build system depends on some GNU utilities that are not installed. Using the following steps I was able to compile for the “native” (i.a. Mac OS) target:

1. Install GNU binutils using MacPorts.
2. Edit “cpu/native/Makefile.native” and adjust the “Compiler Definitions” section like this:
   
### Compiler definitions
CC = gcc
LD = gcc
AS = as
NM = nm
# Use GNU ar instead of /usr/bin/ar
AR = gar
OBJCOPY = objcopy
STRIP = strip
ifdef WERROR
CFLAGSWERROR=-Werror -pedantic -std=c99 -Werror
endif
CFLAGSNO = -Wall -g -I/usr/local/include $(CFLAGSWERROR)
CFLAGS += $(CFLAGSNO) -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=500 -O
# Simplify ld arguments
#LDFLAGS = -Wl,-Map=contiki-$(TARGET).map,-export-dynamic
LDFLAGS = -Wl


Another issue is the ELF binaries for the AVR Raven boards. These files contain all components of the programs: flash and eeprom
images as well as fuse settings. Unfortunately, avrdude cannot read the ELF format. So you have to extract the flash manually:


$ avr-objcopy -R .eeprom -R .fuse -R .signature -O ihex $NAME.elf $NAME.hex


It works similar for the EEPROM section (where the IP data is stored):

$ avr-objcopy -j .eeprom --set-section-flags=.eeprom="alloc,load" --change-section-lma .eeprom=0 -O ihex webserver6.elf webserver6.eep


You can also check which fuse settings are used:

$ avr-objdump -d -S -j .fuse webserver6.elf
webserver6.elf: file format elf32-avr
Disassembly of section .fuse:
00820000 <__fuse>:
820000: e2 99 ff


The directory structure of Contiki is somewhat overwhelming. I am currently working in these directories:

1. contiki-2.4/platform/avr-ravenlcd: This is where the code for the ATMega3290p lives. Run make here and upload.
2. contiki-2.4/platform/avr-raven: The ATMega1284p code lives here, this is where most patches are. Don’t run make here!
3. contiki-2.4/examples/webserver-ipv6-raven: Run make here for the ATMega1284p code. This builds the webserver code and includes the platform/avr-raven dir.

In addition, I have a serial terminal for debugging output:
screen -U /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART 57600

I live close to the DCF77 radio transmitter, so my signal was always pretty strong and clear. This is of course not the case for everybody :-) Gwen Roelants did run into problems. He writes:

Although your code works (thanks for that!) it looked like it was very sensitive to how the antenna was positioned.
I found that I did receive a signal every second, but that for the longer signals, I sometimes got a short flash interrupting it, causing the library to add 2 seconds instead of one. Since I got such a flash in almost every minute it could take a very long time before a proper sync was found, and because 2 seconds were counted the time would also drift during the time no new signal could be decoded.
I found a rather simple fix for your code that greatly improved the reliability and time to find a correct signal.

I don’t have an Arduino around so I did not test it, but the proposed changes seem to be reasonable. You can find the changes in the Arduino forums. Thanks, Gwen!

The photo was CCed on flickr by Nathan Gibbs.

I just released a new version of USBTemp. This one includes some minor bugfixes:

• The placement of C5 was wrong in the schematic.
• The host software now compensates for some USB hickups.
• The RRDTool graph generation script adds minimum, maximum and average temperature readings to the summary.

You can get the new version from the Mikrowerk page. The photo of the Galileo thermometer above was CC’ed on flickr by Nick Lawes.