The Contiki Operating System

Hi all,

(tl;dr: Thingsquare just announced Thingsquare Mist, designed to make the
Internet of Things simple. It is open source and uses Contiki, read more
here: http://www.thingsquare.com/)

We’re now a few months into our great Thingsquare adventure and so far it
has been both extremely interesting and awfully turbulent times. I can
honestly say that I’ve never worked as hard as I’ve done in the past few
months (and that’s from a guy that has always worked extremely hard!).

With Thingsquare we decided to follow a "nail it then scale it" philosophy:
we're bootstrapping out of our own pockets with no investment thus far,
focusing on first finding our awesome business direction before scaling up.
The way to do this is to have a strong customer engagement from early on
and listen to the customers’ expressed questions while working together to
figure out the underlying, non-expressed needs. We are happy to have found
a set of early customers, who have provided a tremendous amount of input as
to how Thingsquare can provide the most value to the world.

One thing that quickly became clear to us was that although Contiki was
great raw material, it was by itself not enough to build the kind of
products we wanted to provide. First, a number of important pieces are
missing, such as encryption, regulation-compliant RF frequency hopping, and
a few others.

But more importantly, pure Contiki systems are just too hard to build. You
have to be a seasoned Contiki expert just to know where to start. Plus,
there are a multitude of options at every single step of the way: should my
system use IPv6 or Rime? Or IPv4? Multi-hop routing or single-hop? Radio
duty cycling? CoAP? HTTP? And once the system is built, how do you set your
system up? Do you need a border router? And how do you build that? How do
you connect your system to the rest of the world - raw IPv6? IPv6/SLIP
tunnel? Or maybe simply through a serial port with a serial port server on
the border router? The options are endless, and Contiki supports them all,
making it really difficult to choose the right ones.

This difficulty is not a problem with Contiki per se. Contiki was always
intended to be raw material from which we could build amazing things. It
was always intended to be used for a variety of different uses. Such
systems by their very nature become difficult beasts to tame - and this is
the way it should be. I like Contiki this way. But it is not necessarily
the best way to build products that should be easy to use.

So we decided to create Thingsquare Mist. A system intended to make it
dramatically easier to build IoT systems. Thingsquare Mist uses Contiki for
IPv6, routing, low-power mechanisms - all that Contiki excels in. But
Thingsquare Mist is much more: seamless IPv4 connectivity, remote secure
software updates, AES-128 encryption, radio frequency agility, network
deployment and debugging tools, and so on.

Couldn't we have built this into Contiki directly? Well, we certainly could
have done that. But in doing so we would also have had to restrict what
Contiki would be. Limiting configuration options. Removing features.
Focusing solely on a subset of what Contiki is today. I wouldn't want to
limit Contiki in that way. Instead, we created Thingsquare Mist.

Thingsquare Mist will be released as open source, and improvements we do to
Contiki when developing Thingsquare Mist will of course be contributed back
to Contiki (we have a few nice patches in the pipeline already).

Thingsquare will provide professional support for Thingsquare Mist users,
inspiring confidence in and providing direct value to people who want to
build their systems on Thingsquare Mist and Contiki.

We plan to release Thingsquare Mist to the world in early 2013. For more
information about Thingsquare Mist, and to sign up for our newsletter, go
to the Thingsquare website: http://www.thingsquare.com/

Best regards,

/adam
--
Adam Dunkels, PhD
Thingsquare - http://www.thingsquare.com/