1 Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating
2 system for memory-constrained networked embedded systems written by
3 Adam Dunkels at the Networked Embedded Systems group at the Swedish
4 Institute of Computer Science.
6 Contiki is designed for embedded systems with small amounts of
7 memory. A typical Contiki configuration is 2 kilobytes of RAM and 40
8 kilobytes of ROM. Contiki consists of an event-driven kernel on top of
9 which application programs are dynamically loaded and unloaded at
10 runtime. Contiki processes use light-weight protothreads that provide
11 a linear, thread-like programming style on top of the event-driven
12 kernel. Contiki also supports per-process optional preemptive
13 multi-threading, interprocess communication using message passing
14 through events, as well as an optional GUI subsystem with either
15 direct graphic support for locally connected terminals or networked
16 virtual display with VNC or over Telnet.
18 Contiki contains two communication stacks: uIP and Rime. uIP is a
19 small RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack that makes it possible for Contiki to
20 communicate over the Internet. Rime is a lightweight communication
21 stack designed for low-power radios. Rime provides a wide range of
22 communication primitives, from best-effort local area broadcast, to
23 reliable multi-hop bulk data flooding.
25 Contiki runs on a variety of platform ranging from embedded
26 microcontrollers such as the MSP430 and the AVR to old
27 homecomputers. Code footprint is on the order of kilobytes and memory
28 usage can be configured to be as low as tens of bytes.
30 Contiki is written in the C programming language and is freely
31 available as open source under a BSD-style license. More information
32 about Contiki can be found at the Contiki home page:
33 http://www.sics.se/contiki/