The Pololu Wixel Software Development Kit (SDK) contains code and Makefiles that will help you create your own applications for the Pololu Wixel. The Wixel is a general-purpose programmable module featuring a 2.4 GHz radio and USB. The Wixel is based on the CC2511F32 microcontroller from Texas Instruments, which has an integrated radio transceiver, 32 KB of flash memory, 4 KB of RAM, and a full-speed USB interface.

Getting Started

To load apps onto the Wixel, you will need to have the Wixel's drivers and software installed on your system. See the Getting Started section of the Pololu Wixel User's Guide.

To develop your own apps or modify existing ones using the Wixel SDK, you will need to have a copy of the Wixel SDK, SDCC version 3.0.0 or later, and you will need to have certain GNU utililties available on your path: cat, cp, echo, grep, make, mv, rm, and sed.

For Windows users, we recommend that you install all of these components by downloading the Wixel Development Bundle, available from the Pololu Wixel User's Guide.

Please see the Writing Your Own Wixel App section of the Pololu Wixel User's Guide for step-by-step instructions for getting started with the Wixel SDK.

Downloading the Wixel SDK itself

The Wixel SDK is available as a git repository hosted on github. You can get the latest version by installing git and running:

git clone -o pololu git://github.com/pololu/wixel-sdk.git

If you need help, see github's instructions on how to Set Up Git. For Windows users, we also recommend installing TortoiseGit because it provides a good graphical user interface for git.

You can also download the latest version of the Wixel SDK from github.

Building and Loading Apps

Open a command-line terminal, navigate to the top level directory of the SDK, and type "make". This will build all of the apps in the apps folder and all of the libraries that they depend on.

To load an app onto all the Wixels connected to the computer, type "make load_APPNAME" where APPNAME is the name of your app's folder in the apps directory.

To open your app in the Wixel Configuration Utility, type "make open_APPNAME".

Running any of the commands above will rebuild your app if it is out of date.

Creating Your Own App

To create your own app, simply copy one of the existing folders in the apps directory and change its name. You do not need to modify the Makefile; the Makefile will automatically detect the new app as long as it is in the apps folder.

If your app doesn't use the default set of libraries defined in libraries/libs.mk, you can specify which libraries your app uses by creating a file called options.mk in your app directory and defining a GNU Make variable in it called APP_LIBS that contains a list of the file names of the libraries your app uses, separated by spaces. See apps/test_board/options.mk for an example.

Documentation of Wixel SDK Libraries

The Libraries page contains an overview of all the libraries available in this SDK.

The File List page links to the documentation for all the library functions, grouped by header file. This documentation is auto-generated from the .h files in the SDK.

The Globals page contains an index of all the global functions variables, typedefs, and defines in this SDK.

To generate this documentation yourself, type "make docs" (requires Doxygen).

Other Documentation

Documentation for the Wixel itself is available in the Pololu Wixel User's Guide provided by Pololu. The user's guide contains schematic diagrams, pinout diagrams, documentation for the apps, example wiring, and more.

Documentation for the CC2511F32 (the microcontroller on the Wixel) is available in the CC2511F32 datasheet provided by Texas Instruments. The datasheet provides detailed technical information about the hardware peripherals and how to control them, as well as electrical specifications, and more. Texas Instruments also provides many app notes and design notes on the CC2511 page.

Documentation for SDCC is available on the SDCC website.

Make Interrupt/Exception Error

You might get the following error message from make in Windows:

make: Interrupt/Exception caught (code = 0xc00000fd, addr = 0x425073)

If you get this error, please run "make -v" at a Command Prompt and make sure that you are running GNU Make 3.82-pololu1 or later. This version of make is included in the latest Wixel Development Bundle, available from the Pololu Wixel User's Guide. If the output from "make -v" shows some other version of make even after installing the Wixel Development Bundle, then you should remove that other version of make from your PATH or reorder your PATH so that version 3.82-pololu1 (or later) is used. You can edit your PATH environment variable from the Control Panel. See the pololu/make wiki on github for more information on this problem.

Getting Help

If you have a problem or question, feel free to ask us on the Pololu Forum.