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Anaren Air Booster Pack Needs More (simpler) Example Code

James Dinsmore
Prodigy 10 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: SIMPLICITI, ENERGIA

 

Dear Texas Instruments/Anaren,

Your Air Booster Pack (i.e. Shield) for the Texas Instruments (TI) LaunchPad has a lot of potential, but there are some really high barriers for novices to utilize them. A hobbyist would certainly like to do more than run the demo code; a natural desire would be to hack in other sensors (than the TI MCU's built-in temperature sensor) for instance. The problem is the demo code is too ' obfuscated'.

By that I mean after 2 months of trying to understand the code well enough to know where to 'hack in' another sensor, I am still at a loss of where to start, or which file to modify. The heart of any C code is "main.c". (It is not there). "Main.c" lists two dependencies, (#include...h files); which also have multiple dependencies, 20 .h files in all. For each of those there is a similar .c file; but with different code. I printed it all out, and counted over 4000 lines of code and papered my home with it trying to follow the gist of the program. (I question if this is beyond mere mortals).

"obfuscated code is the deliberate act of making source or machine code difficult to understand by humans"

With the talent you have in your Engineering Dept., you could provide some more sets of sample code that is simpler in scope and easier to understand (and that would be good for training purposes). A good start would be a simple wireless UART, so bytes can be pushed in one Anaren/TI Booster pack/Launchpad set up and the same bytes come out the other one connected to a PC's USB port. Normal technical generalists could make use of code like that. Another code example should show how to use one of the MSP430's analog inputs to measure an external sensor and to send those bytes over the RF link.

A good , comparative product is Pololu's Wixel. Out of the box, bytes in one unit, bytes out the other via RF. TI wants to grow in the hobbyist market, and a lot of engineers who are not embedded experts want to learn more and utilize widgets to perform better work. However, as long as the bar is as high as it currently is to do anything with the AirBooster pack, very few customers will succeed. Please invest in the success of your customers with some better code examples.

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1336

Sincerely,

James M. Dinsmore

  • Guru 35415 points

    James Dinsmore said:
    The heart of any C code is "main.c".

    Well, that's not actually true: the 'C' programming language mandates a function called main() - but is totally silent on the name of the source file in which it resides.

  • Intellectual 965 points

    Hello James,

    You may find some helpful information here:  http://www.43oh.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1889 and here: http://www.43oh.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1953

    My understanding is that the code shipped with the booster packs was developed by Anaren. The threads mentioned above discuss using TI's Simpliciti protocol (which is much simpler) with the booster pack.  The second thread is about setting up Simpliciti in CCS and mentions a different RF chip. But the process is very similar.

    Hope this helps.

  • Guru 27285 points

     Hi James, I agree with you sometimes example code from TI are useless, the POLOLU you mention is sold to do education and need to be of specific use for basic development. I don't know about ANAREN AIT booster pack due I wish to get a pair but I must wait they come back in stock to evaluate them. I suppose simpliciTI can be the best solution, ANAREN is an RF company and may be they developed a good RF layout but not software.

  • in reply to Dubnet
    Prodigy 20 points

    Neither link works. any other suggestions?

    Bill

  • in reply to Bill Penner
    Intellectual 965 points

    Hello Bill,

    They have had some recent problems with the site so that may be why the links are no longer working.  However, if you go to forum.43oh.com and search on the relevant keywords you should still be able to find the content.

    Dubnet

  • in reply to Bill Penner
    TI__Intellectual 2765 points
    James, I've had good luck using the Anaren Air Booster Pack using Energia (http://energia.nu/).

    In case you're not familiar with it, Energia is a port of Arduino that supports TI Launchpads. Thankfully, the Energia project now includes the Air Booster Pack library and examples, making it pretty easy to get started. In my case, I took one of their examples and adopted it to send my own data/messages over-the-air.

    Depending upon your final project's needs, you may have to dig into the details as others have described. But I found Energia helped me get a proof-of-concept design up and running in one evening.

    ------
    One final comment. We found that the Anaren library (and examples) started failing last fall. Funny enough, it worked on our old Boosterpacks but not brand new ones. Still using Energia, we were able to do a little debugging by running our Energia project in CCSv6. Apparently the Anaren Boosterpack hardware was revised and given a new revision number. This caused Anaren's library to fail, as it wasn't updated and didn't recognize the new rev number. Hopefully this has been addressed in a library update, but I haven't checked on it since late last fall.


    Good Luck,
    Scott

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