Skip to content
maniacbug edited this page Aug 15, 2011 · 8 revisions

Navigation: Home | Scenarios | Installing | Using | Future

Table of Contents

What is SLIP?

SLIP is the "mostly obsolete" wikipedia:Serial Line Internet Protocol. "On personal computers, SLIP has been largely replaced by the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is better engineered, has more features and does not require its IP address configuration to be set before it is established. On microcontrollers, however, SLIP is still the preferred way of encapsulating IP packets due to its very small overhead."

Contiki uses SLIP to bridge the wireless IPv6 network onto a PC via a USB connection. So with your Zigduino plugged into your PC, and the right software running on each, traffic from the wireless IP network can reach your site-wide Ethernet network and potentially beyond.

On Zigduino, there is only one UART exposed. This means we have to choose between reading debug messages and connecting to our PC via SLIP. This change is exposed by adding "WITH_SLIP=1" to the makefile or command line for any particular project. Projects made "WITH_SLIP" will expect to talk to a slip tunnel on the PC side.

Speaking of the PC side... In order for SLIP to work, something on the PC has to be listening. Using Instant Contiki, the 'tunslip6' will do this. Running it in Linux creates a 'tun0' interface which gives the connected Zigduino an address of aaaa::1 on your local network.

Platform Changes

Commit #629608e adds SLIP capability to Zigduino. This change adds in the SLIP-handling files, slip.c and slip_uart0.c. It also changes the bootup process to dedicate UART0 to SLIP, not simple debug traffic.

Building

First, built the tunslip6 tool. This works without modification on Instant Contiki.

$ cd tools<br/>
$ make tunslip6

Now make and upload the border router itself. Be sure to include "WITH_SLIP=1" to turn on slip for this node, and "WITH_WEBSERVER=0" to exclude a web server from this node.

$ cd examples/ipv6/rpl-border-router
$ make TARGET=avr-zigduino savetarget
$ make WITH_SLIP=1 WITH_WEBSERVER=0 -j10
$ make upload AVRDUDE_PORT=/dev/ttyUSB0

Connecting

Ok, now it's built. Let's bring up the slip interface on Linux. Note that the baud rate here has to match the baud rate in the uart setup on the board, which is currently 38400. That's a little slow, but I'll work on bringing it up in future revisions. Also note the "v6" switch. That turns on maximum debugging output so we can follow along.

$ sudo ../../../tools/tunslip6 aaaa::1/64 -s /dev/ttyUSB0 -B 38400 -v6

********SLIP started on ``/dev/ttyUSB0''
opened tun device ``/dev/tun0''
ifconfig tun0 inet `hostname` up
ifconfig tun0 add aaaa::1/64
ifconfig tun0

tun0      Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          inet addr:127.0.1.1  P-t-P:127.0.1.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
          inet6 addr: aaaa::1/64 Scope:Global
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

tun0      Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  P-t-P:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
          inet6 addr: aaaa::1/64 Scope:Global
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)


IP addresses [4 max]
fdfd::3
fe80::11:22ff:fe33:4403
RPL-Border router started
*** Address:aaaa::1 => aaaa:0000:0000:0000
SIN: 10
Got configuration message of type P
Setting prefix aaaa::
created a new RPL dag
Server IPv6 addresses:
 aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403
 fdfd::3
 fe80::11:22ff:fe33:4403

It's helpful that tunslip6 is putting through the debug messages from the Zigduino. So we can see the boot-up process complete successfully.

Ping

We should now be able to ping the border router from the host PC. First, we can ping its auto-configured aaaa::/64 address

$ ping6 aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403
PING aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403(aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=66.1 ms
64 bytes from aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=68.6 ms
64 bytes from aaaa::11:22ff:fe33:4403: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=66.2 ms

Nodes beyond the border

We want to reach more nodes than just the one connected. So let's add a route on the host PC. This "route add" command tells Ubuntu that whenever it wants to reach a node whose IP starts with fdfd::/64, it can send that through the tun0 interface.

$ sudo route -A inet6 add fdfd::/64 dev tun0
$ netstat -r6
Kernel IPv6 routing table
Destination                    Next Hop                   Flag Met Ref Use If
aaaa::/64                      ::                         U    256 0     0 tun0
fdfd::/64                      ::                         U    1   0     0 tun0

Now that we have the route set up, we can put another node on the network, and ping that.

Put anything that speaks RPL on fdfd::1, for example rpl-collect/sender

$ cd examples/ipv6/rpl-collect
$ make TARGET=avr-zigduino savetarget
$ make udp-sender.avr-zigduino.u AVRDUDE_PORT=/dev/ttyUSB1 -j10

Now see that we can ping it ok:

$ ping6 fdfd::1
PING fdfd::1(fdfd::1) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from fdfd::1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=67.8 ms
64 bytes from fdfd::1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=66.3 ms
Clone this wiki locally