This package contains a Linux device driver for the ``RPC'' (Radio Packet Controller) model of radio manufactured by Radiometrix. The RPC is a fairly low-power, self-contained, short-range, plug-on radio. It requires only a simple antenna, 5V power supply, and interface to a byte-wide I/O port on a host microcontroller or bi-directional PC parallel port. The module provides all the RF circuits and processor intensive low level packet formatting and packet recovery functions required to inter-connect an number of microcontrollers in a radio network.
A data packet of 1 to 27 bytes downloaded by a host microcontroller into the RPC's packet buffer is transmitted by the RPC's transceiver and will ``appear'' in the receive buffer of all the RPC's within radio range.
This software package allows control of an RPC under Linux if the RPC is connected to a bi-directional PC parallel port. The driver is a Linux kernel module that implements two types of device drivers:
This Radiometrix driver was written by Jeremy Elson (jelson@circlemud.org) while at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. This work was supported by DARPA under grant No. DABT63-99-1-0011 as part of the SCADDS project, and was also made possible in part due to support from Cisco Systems. It is freely available under the GNU Public License (GPL). Up-to-date information, including the latest version of the software, is available via the SCADDS home page, or directly from the author's page.