Version 2.6 of Contiki, the open source operating system for the Internet of Things, has just been released. With its IP stack that fits in a few kilobyte of memory, Contiki lets tiny battery-operated wireless devices communicate directly over the Internet. Contiki is used in a wide variety of systems such as city sound monitoring, street lights, networked electrical power meters, industrial monitoring, radiation monitoring, construction site monitoring, alarm systems, and remote house monitoring. The 2.6 release introduces Antelope, a new SQL-like database for tiny flash memories, as well as a new JSON/HTTP webservice back-end.
While this article is probably not going to get much attention because it lacks the usual suspects (microsoft, linux, google, apple), I’d really like to see more in depth articles covering these kinds of projects. We cover a lot of things from the news here, but sometimes it’s fun to read about projects like this one that are constructive in nature, something that can inspire us to get involved.
And it probably doesn’t help matters much that, just like Ubuntu, I can’t pronounce the name of this OS just by looking at it. But hey, it runs on a C64, so at least it gets brownie points for that
“Contiki” isn’t that hard to pronounce, is it?
It’s basically a model of modern OS on 8bit devices first one since in 30 years (CPM).
Edited 2012-07-18 06:56 UTC
CP/M wasn’t much to speak about. And there were technically quite noteworthy OS back then (like OS-9), or in the meantime (GEOS), so Contiki is hardly the first since – and also not focusing exclusively on 8bit.
Overall, while Contiki managing to find its useful niche (among the likes of TinyOS) is a cause for celebration, it’s a bit too bad that it happened at the cost of 8bit veterans on which Contiki started: they are basically neglected (at least older versions are still around… http://hitmen.c02.at/html/tools_contiki.html ) – and as far as what can be done on them goes, SymbOS kinda stole the spotlight (http://youtu.be/2-oBNh0UkQc don’t get too excited, the mp3 is handled by decoder chip …but, still)