Ya, that is interesting. I didn't look at the schematics - I just assumed
they were on the same bus.  I can access the radio fine and the flash fine
seperately, but sometimes accessing both has crashed the mote for me in the
past.

And as far as reading vs. writing, I think it would depend on when the
actual read and write is performed in relation to using the radio.

I have meetings all day today, but I'd like to look into this further when I
have some time.  The FlashBridge component, by the way, sits on top of
PageEEPROM for the mica platforms in TinyOS 1.x.

-David


-----Original Message-----
From: Munaretto, Daniel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 1:38 AM
To: Philip Levis; David Moss
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [Tinyos-help] repeating tests,no free memory


Well, i'm thinking about..when i tested the FlashBridge interface, i used a
mote connected to the programming board, and everything was perfect. And
without using the radio, so without send/receive interfaces. i only worked
on reading and writing some bytes in flash.Now there are problems with
motes, and i'm using batteries of 1.5 V, so 3V. So may be there is a
conflict between flash and radio.I will check by tests.
By the way, why does this kind of problem rise up only when i read from
flash and not also in the writing phase?It doesn't agree with the
explanation of the bus usage, right?
 
Daniele

        -----Original Message----- 
        From: Philip Levis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
        Sent: Wed 9/20/2006 2:54 AM 
        To: David Moss 
        Cc: Munaretto, Daniel; [email protected] 
        Subject: Re: [Tinyos-help] repeating tests,no free memory
        
        

        On Sep 19, 2006, at 3:17 PM, David Moss wrote:
        
        > Are you accessing the Flash memory while using the radio?  I 
        > believe I ran
        > into some serious issues doing this with the MicaZ. The problem, I

        > believe,
        > is in the bus arbitration - because both the flash and the radio 
        > use the
        > same SPI bus lines, if you're actively using flash and radio 
        > together on a
        > micaz, the mote crashes.
        >
        
        That's interesting; I believe that the flash and CC2420 do not share

        an SPI bus on the mica platforms.
        
        > This doesn't happen with telos motes.
        >
        > I am about to start testing TinyOS 2.x to see if it still has this

        > problem.
        > I believe it shouldn't and doesn't because it has a better bus 
        > resource
        > arbitration story.  i.e. the radio has to request access to the
bus 
        > before
        > using it, and the flash has to request access before using it,
etc.
        
        Yes, this has been a major focus for 2.x. The bus on the Telos 
        platform is heavily overloaded (SPI to radio, SPI to flash, I2C for 
        sensors, UART, etc.) and so requires a lot of effort to abstract 
        properly in a way that's flexible and robust.
        
        It turns out that this actually simplifies code in a lot of other 
        ways, though. For example, the radio stack actually has the receive 
        and transmit paths be separate users of the bus, which individually 
        arbitrate for it.
        
        Phil
        



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