Wireless Composer in Atmel Studio 6

By: Magnus Perdersen

Wireless Composer in Atmel Studio 6

The Wireless Composer allows you to easily and seamlessly evaluate and test RF systems at an early stage of development. Wireless Composer simplifies the design process by tying together the tools required to edit the code in Atmel Studio, evaluate and test the RF system.

Wireless Composer is fully integrated into Atmel Studio 6.1 as an extension, and consists of:

1. Wireless Library – Contains Atmel Software Framework (ASF) compliant Wireless example Performance Test projects to evaluate designs using various Atmel devices and transceivers. A set of precompiled projects are also available as a separate download in Wireless Library hex.
2. Performance Analyzer – A tool used to evaluate and configure Low Power RF Transceivers and wireless microcontrollers from Atmel.

The Wireless Library contains ASF compliant Wireless example projects. The Performance Analyzer application is available for the following kits:

• ATREB212BSMA-EK
• ATREB231ED-EK
• ATREB231FE2-EK
• ATREB232ED-EK
• ATREB233SMAD-EK
• ATRF4CE-EK
• ATmega256RFR2-EK
• ATmega256RFR2-XPRO

Atmel wireless evaluation and development kits are available for purchase from the Atmel Store.

The Performance Analyzer is a useful tool to help Measure and Analyze the RF performance characteristics of the supported Atmel 802.15.4 wireless platforms.

This tool provides the user with the capability to perform Energy Scans across standard 802.15.4 RF channels to create a visual representation of the RF energy surrounding the location of the radio platform, connected to the Performance Analyzer. Once you have selected a relatively quiet RF channel to use in further RF measurements, you will then find other helpful features contained within the Analyzer. The PER (packet error test) is one such example. This test allows one to collect numerical information regarding the quality of the RF link between two paired nodes.

Parameters such as LQI, RSSI, Packet Error Rate and Throughput can be examined and recorded. This information can also be used to create numerical information regarding Range capabilities between the two paired RF nodes. When it’s time to analyze RF transmissions, TX output power, RX sensitivity or power consumption, the Performance Analyzer provides many functions that allow configuration of the radio registers. Register access allows controlling the current operational state of the RF device, all without writing any additional C code, or developing additional test firmware to configure the device for these measurements.