Slashdot-20110615-benwpan

NanoNote Goes Wireless

When people come across the NanoNote open-source hand-held, the question first asked is often: "Does it have wireless?", and until now the answer was "no". Getting wireless into a design driven by the objective to keep things open turns out to be surprisingly difficult, as nearly all WLAN chips on the market require proprietary firmware, whether programmed during production or loaded at boot-time.

The workaround that finally brought users their longed-for wireless connectivity was to abandon the WLAN spec altogether and implement wireless dongles based on the more open 6LoWPAN specification. Based on the 802.15.4 physical layer, Ben-WPAN can't keep up with WLAN in terms of bandwidth, but reduced battery usage and complexity will make up for it.

After months of hard work, the first batch of working 6LoWPAN dongles just saw the light of the day and mostly survived initial tests. Want to see the (ugly) details? All design and source files, including production documentation, are published under Creative Commons and/or GPL compatible licenses.

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