The basic toolkit comes with 3 mica2 motes, 2 sensor boards and an MIB510 interface board. Notice that you can plug in the sensor boards into the mica2 motes. We won’t need the sensor boards for the initial setup though.

For uploading a program into a mote, do the following:
- Go into the /opt/tinyos-1.x/apps/Blink folder. You should see a few .nc files and a Makefile. We use the Blink application to illustrate how to upload a NesC program to a mote.

- Place the mote board into the bay on the MIB510. We recommend powering the MIB510 with a 3V supply to the connector on it(Batteries caused us a few problems). You should see the red LED on the MIB510 turned on at this point.

- Plug the MIB510 into the serial port of the computer in which you have TinyOS installed(We used COM1).Turn the MIB510 on(there is a switch for doing that on the MIB510).

- To the Makerules file in /opt/tinyos-1.x/apps, set the radio frequency by adding the following line at the end of the file
PFLAGS += -DCC1K_DEF_FREQ=916700000 .
You might have to set the frequency to the appropriate value based on the motes you are using. The above value is specific to the configuration we mentioned above.

- Type ‘MIB510=/dev/COM1 make mica2 install’ at the command line. You should see something similar to the following:

$ MIB510=/dev/COM1 make mica2 install
avr-objcopy --output-target=srec binr
uisp -dprog=dapa -dno-poll -dlpt=3 --
Atmel AVR AT90S8535 is found.
Erasing device ...
Reinitializing device
Atmel AVR AT90S8535 is found.
sleep 1
uisp -dprog=dapa -dlpt=3 --upload if=
Atmel AVR AT90S8535 is found.
Uploading: flash
sleep 1
uisp -dprog=dapa -dlpt=3 -dno-poll --
Atmel AVR AT90S8535 is found.
Verifying: flash
make: Nothing to be done for `mica'

If you see this, you have just successfully uploaded a program to the mote. You can now unplug the mote, put in batteries and turn it on. You should see the red LED blinking periodically.

Important note: When the mote is plugged in to an external power supply(during the upload process), make sure the batteries are not in the motes. This could cause hardware damage.

Troubleshooting

There are a few common errors that can show up, especially with the older MIB500. We cover the following below and offer a few things you can try out:

1. You get flash errors when you run ‘make mica2 install’
Suggestions: Make sure you have the TinyOS installation on the c drive. If you have it installed on another drive, look at the TinyOS documentation on how to resolve this. Next, try following the instructions given in http://www.xbow.com/Support/Support_pdf_files/UISPHELP.pdf for minimizing flash errors, especially in the last page. If none of this solves the problem, you could possibly have hardware problems with the mote or the MIB500.