Introduction

Wireless Sensor Networks are nowadays deployed in academic and industrial environments. The very limited set of resources available in the popular hardware platforms, and the diversified domains of WSN applications, require the adoption of an Operating System responding to the following pre-requisites:

 - minimum footprint to fit the limited RAM capacity (of the order of few KB);
 - tunable scheduling algorithm to handle the execution of the tasks;
 - an application interface acting on the kernel layer and well decoupled from OS service implementation.

Many WSNs are deployed making use of AVR 5-based  sensor boards like those commercialized by CrossBow Inc.

Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid for Atmel AVR ATmega128

Embedded applications often require tight control on the temporal behavior of each single activity in the system. The research in the field of real-time systems brought the team of Evidence Srl to design a small, efficient, modular real-time kernel that can be used to easily guarantee real-time constraints in every embedded applications.

Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid represent the answer of Evidence Srl for the development of scalable real-time applications for the Atmel AVR5 family.

The main features of ERIKA Enterprise and RT-Druid which are specific for Atmel AVR are the following:

• Installation setup of Evidence Erika Enterprise + RT-Druid;
• Full support for the AVR-GCC compiler distributed inside WinAVR;
• Full support of the AVRStudio IDE;
• Full support for the Atmel JTAG ICE MKII debugger;
• Full support for Atmel AVR5 ATmega128 and ATmega103 (in compatibility mode) ;
• Support for the Atmel 802.15.4 (ZigBee) wireless communication protocol;
• Support for the Atmel STK500/501 development board;

Integration with Atmel corp. products 

Erika Enterpise and RT-Druid aims to the best integration with the existing tools for development available from Atmel corp. 

RT-Druid will be used to quickly configure the application, setting temporal parameters of real-time tasks, memory requirements, stack allocation and many other parameters. RT-Druid generates the application template, and leaves the developer the task to implement the logic of each single task.

While programming the application, the developer can exploit the power and flexibility offered by  the primitives of the Erika Enterprise real-time kernel.

The application which are generated from RT-Druid and ERIKA Enterprise can be imported into Atmel AVRStudio and can be flashed into the microcontroller memory using the JTAG ICE MKII or the included free UISP tool.

Getting ERIKA Enterprise for the AVR microcontrollers 

Erika Enterpise and RT-Druid for the AVR family are now in beta testing. If you want to evaluate the product for your own boards, or if you would like to try a free demo, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .