To help you measure RF performance in wireless designs, Atmel offers a Wireless Composer through the Atmel Gallery online apps store for embedded software, tools and extensions. The Wireless Composer provides a GUI for RF performance measurements while running selected Atmel wireless evaluation kits.
Using the Wireless Composer is straightforward — after you’ve downloaded the tool from Atmel Gallery, you select and download the proper hex file, and save it to any location on your PC. The Atmel Studio 6 Tools menu has a Device Programming menu that you can use to load the hex file into your target wireless platform. On the Composer’s opening screen, you select the Performance Analyzer from the Tools menu, start the tool and designate the proper port and connection to your target platform. Once all of the configuration steps are complete, you can view RF performance levels following measures including an energy detection scan, a single packet error rate (PER) test, continuous PER logging and more.
Wireless Composer supports several designated Atmel evaluation boards; the tool can also perform tests on other boards. The complete source code for the Wireless Library is available from Atmel Gallery. You can port this code to support the I/O configuration of a non-Atmel board. Just be sure that access is provided to the TXD and RXD signals of the UART or to a USB virtual COM port, if available. Also, make sure there are no conflicts with push buttons or LEDs used in the Wireless Composer apps or other I/O initializations. The tool should work easily with other boards as long as the boards use the same chipset or SoC used on a supported Atmel kit.
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