HappyTuesday Week 4 – TI EZ430 Chronos Watch Setup

Last week was little crazy. I actually couldn't find time to do the things that I would like to do on a Tuesday But met couple of interesting people from the internet. I must say the open data scene in India is opening up. BTW if you are interested in Open Data Scene in India. I run a weekly blog series called Open Data India Watch, subscribe to it :)

Tuesdays are my 20% project days. Even though sometimes I may not do things on Tuesday and do it on other days. Its still a HappyTuesday project.

I found time to explore my new watch TI EZ430. It's not very powerful in terms of cpu or memory. It's an advantage as much as it's a challenge. It has a good battery life, it runs on a commonly availabe coin cell lithiumb battery - CR2032. It's Based on the CC430F6137 <1 GHz RF SoC, with 96 segment LCD display and has integrated pressure, temparature, battery sensor and 3-axis accelerometer for motion sensitive control. It has 8kB of internal flash memory for data logging and about 5kb for user programs. I just booted the watch this week, synced the time and tested the accelerometer this week. I have listed the details about installation and running below for starters.

You can download the drivers and software required for linux. Follow the steps below to install on 64bit computer.

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 libx11-6:i386 libasound2:i386 libatk1.0-0:i386 libcairo2:i386 libcups2:i386 libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 libgconf-2-4:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libgtk-3-0:i386 libice6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libsm6:i386 liborbit2:i386 libudev1:i386 libusb-0.1-4:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libxt6:i386 libxtst6:i386 libgnomeui-0:i386 libusb-1.0-0-dev:i386 libcanberra-gtk-module:i386

sudo apt-get install tcl8.5 tk8.5 xdotool

#Extract the zip
#Make the Chronos-setup executable
chmod +x Chronos-Setup
#run it as sudo, it should extract into your home folder
sudo Chronos-Setup

Once the installation is complete. Attach the RF transmitter to your computer USB and check if everything is fine.

$lsmod | grep acm

cdc_acm                28754  0 


$dmesg | grep cdc_acm

cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
cdc_acm: USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

$ls -l /dev/ttyACM0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 Jul 23 21:11 /dev/ttyACM0

The code above shows that device is running at "/dev/ttyACM0". If you see that the RF Access Point gets assigned to a different device (e.g. ttyACM1), either remove the serial device that occupy this slot (e.g. a modem), or change the script file variable "com".

To run

#Make sure that the script file is executable
  
$chmod u+x ./eZ430-Chronos_CC_1_2.tcl 

#Now start the script by simply executing 
#it as root user from a terminal window, e.g.
  
 $ ./eZ430-Chronos_CC_1_2.tcl

Now go to accelerometer tab, start it and shake the watch to see if ts working fine.

Next I will try to write some python code to send & receive data from the watch. Also want to try a new firmware, but may be later.