Talking Tock

Talking Tock 11 Mar. 6th 2017 by Amit

This is the eleventh post in a series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

Tock In-Person

In the last two weeks we had two great in-person meetings. First, some of us met at University of Michigan to tag-along to a workshop on Signpost, a modular city-scale sensing platform that uses Tock under-the-hood. Next, some of us met at Stanford for a Tock focused meeting. I forgot to snap some pictures to share even though I intended to. But trust me, both meetings happened.

The Signpost meeting was particularly exciting because about 15 new programmers built some Tock apps to run on Signpost. As the signpost platform matures, look for new exciting announcements around hardware and platform availability, as well as some new Tock primitives surrounding distributed programming and multicore resource sharing that are in early discussion stages from the project.

NRF51 Progress

@niklasad1 and @frenicth from Chalmers University have been making steady progress on support for the NRF51. So far they have upstreamed support for the temperature sensor and random number generator. Even more exciting, though, they have prototyped support for the Bluetooth Low Energy advertising directly in the Tock kernel! This will be one of only a small number of open-source (down-to-the-metal) Bluetooth Low Energy stacks and the only one in Rust.

Some cleanup and testing is still needed, but here’s a screenshot of the NRF51 development kit advertising from Tock to my phone:

Pull Requests

Merged

Proposed