Tock Logo

Talking Tock

Talking Tock 36

Defining registers, paper season and un-broken links

This is the 36th post in a series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

We’re presenting Tock today at the Linux Foundation’s OpenIoT summit in Portland! Check out the event website for details.

  1. Porting to New Register Interface
  2. SenSys Push
  3. Pull Requests
    1. Merged
    2. Proposed
    3. Approval period

Porting to New Register Interface

As we’ve discussed previously, @shaneleonard introduced a new interface for defining structs to model memory mapped I/O registers. In the last couple weeks there has been a concerted effort to port the SAM4L, NRF52 and ports to new chips to this interface.

If you maintain a port of Tock, give this new interface a short! There are now plenty of examples to work from. It’s not mandatory—you can still define registers however you like—but we think it’s much more readable and easier to get right.

SenSys Push

It’s paper writing season again. The submission deadline for SenSys 2018 (this time held in Shenzen, China, which is pretty exciting!) is in early April, and many frequent Tock contributors are burrying their heads to write up research results on time.

This means two things. First, there might be a slow down in major code contributions over the next couple months. Two, there should be some exciting new features just in time for the next rolling release! I don’t want to steal any valor from the papers themselves, but I can share that the roadmap includes 6lowpan/Thread edge-device support, automatic clock management on the SAM4L, and a standardized interface for BLE advertising.

Pull Requests

Bolded pull requests were marked “P-Significant”

Merged

Proposed

Approval period