Contiki, the Open Source Operating System for the Internet of Things (IoS), will hold a two-day introductory course in February this year to help people understand how the IoT and products linked to it work.
The course, to be held from February 4 in Sweden, is aimed at engineers, architects, CTOs and others with a technical background. A background in programming is useful but not strictly necessary, say the organisers. By the end of the course, participants will “have gathered a solid understanding” of the different pieces of an IoT system and how they interact. The participants will get hands-on experience with how an IoT system works.
Contiki, which is like the Linux of IoT, provides low-power Internet communication. It supports fully standard IPv6 and IPv4, along with the recent low-power wireless standards: 6lowpan, RPL, CoAP. With Contiki’s ContikiMAC and sleepy routers, even wireless routers can be battery-operated.
Contiki was developed by a world-wide team of developers with contributions from Atmel, Cisco, ETH, Redwire LLC, SAP, Thingsquare, and many others, and is led by Adam Dunkels of Thingsquare.
Participants will get to work hands-on with the Thingsquare evaluation kit and build prototype wireless IoT systems with IPv6/6lowpan and Cloud connectivity. The Thingsquare 2.4 GHz evaluation kit contains everything needed to test and evaluate the 2.4 GHz version of the Thingsquare system in a client’s specific scenario and under his specific requirements. The kit allows clients to build a proof-of-concept system for their connected system or product in minutes, and is meant for those working in the field of IoT.
Contiki was born out of Adam Dunkels’ idea to connect “unexpected things” to the Internet. In 2001, the open source uIP stack was developed as a smaller cousin to lwIP and quickly spread across the embedded world. But uIP wasn’t just used in numerous deeply embedded systems, it also Internet-enabled some unexpected things. In 2003, Contiki followed suit.
In 2004, the concept of protothreads, which now forms the basis of Contiki’s processes, was introduced in Contiki. The basis of Contiki and most of its core functions, such as the kernel, most libraries, the uIP stack, and the Rime stack, where written by Adam Dunkels.
Helping him in this endeavour were other developers like Giovanni Pellerano, who did the pic32 port, Oliver Schmidt, who did the Microsoft Windows and Apple II port and was part of the development of protothreads, and Niclas Finne, who worked on the Z1 and Wismot ports and wrote parts of the MSPsim emulator along with Joakim Eriksson and others.
Image Credit: Contiki
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