
The Contiki team has just released version 2.1 of the
open source Contiki operating
system for low-power, wireless, memory-constrained networked
embedded devices that typically have as little a few kilobytes of
RAM. The major highlight of this release is a unique
energy
profiling mechanism that measures where energy is spent, and how
much energy that is consumed. This is extremely important when
optimizing for low-power operation: to know where to optimize, one
must first know where energy is spent. Other additions to the 2.1
release are low-power radio protocols that increase system lifetime
from days to years, and improved data collection routing protocols.