D-Cube Benchmark

The entire software stack for the (public D-Cube instance) has been released as open-source as well and can be found (here). The initial documentation of the stack is avaialble (here).

D-Cube Design

D-Cube is published as open source hardware under CC-BY-SA (online). D-Cube is a low-cost tool that allows to accurately profile the end-to-end delay, reliability, and power consumption, of low-power wireless sensor nodes, as well as to graphically visualize their evolution in real-time. This tool has been used to set-up the EWSN 2016, 2017 and 2018 dependability competitions.

• EWSN 2016 Dependability Competition (Graz, Austria)
• EWSN 2017 Dependability Competition (Uppsala, Sweden)
• EWSN 2018 Dependability Competition (Madrid, Spain)
• EWSN 2019 Dependability Competition (Beijing, China)

A scientific paper about D-Cube was published at the 14th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), and is available here. An scientific paper describing D-Cube's binary patching capability and explaining how to use D-Cube to benchmark low-power wireless systems was published at the 1st International Workshop on Benchmarking Cyber-Physical Networks and Systems (CPSBench), and can be downloaded here.
A set of slides giving a brief overview of D-Cube's capabilities and architecture can be found here.

D-Cube Hardware

The design files in this repository where used to fabricate the current iteration of D-Cube. The GPS module used is a Navspark-GL. For the complementary MOSFET a NTJD4105CT2G was chosen in the final design.

The current version of the hardware (2.1)

The current version of the hardware supports multiple bi-directional GPIOs via isolation. It also adds support for PoE via a PEM1305 module. The aging navspark has been replaced with a more generic ublox neo footprint.

The orignal version of the hardware (1.0)

The prototype used during EWSN 2016

D-Cube Software

The Software consists of two parts

• A task reading the ADC into a FIFO (on top of a real-time Linux kernel)
• A task reading the FIFO and writing it to the database (InfluxDB)

D-Cube contains a power switch circuit which controls the power before the DCDC isolator. A high signal on GPIO23 is required for the ADC and the target to be supplied with power. The gpio.sh file contains an example for this.

Real-Time Linux

We used https://github.com/emlid/linux-rt-rpi but others should work fine

Visualisation

InfluxDB has many frontends available, we used grafana (http://grafana.org/)