Thread Group Membership, certification and development tools

[karel_povalac]

Hello,

I would like to create a small topic about Thread Group membership, certification and development tools. The reason is to collect several basic information for new users. I know it doesn’t go into the details, but a brief description would be a good starting point.

Thread membership and certification – The NXP Thread stack is currently certified, see the - Thread Press Releases - Certified SW.

Basically there are two type of Thread certificates Component and End Products. Kinetis KW2xD Thread Software is a “Thread Certified Component”. When a customer takes the certified software and builds their application on top of the certified solution it will create an “end product”. All the end products has to be based on Thread Certified Component.

The Thread Group offers the test harness software. It is a windows tool which can be downloaded already and it can drive a set of hardware from usual suspects (NXP, ARM, Silicon Labs) to run the certification test suite. The test harness has defined a Thread Test Plan. Using the test harness you may get a kind of a pre-certification. Also a wireless sniffers are used to capture the over the air traffic and data packets. Formal certification then means scheduling a slot at a test lab - Underwriters Laboratory (a major test services provider in the US). The advantage is all tests can be done in advance running the test harness "at home".

See the enclosed pdf file with couple of slides from marketing presentation. If you would like to have an access to the Test Harness SW, the company needs to have a Contributor Thread Group membership.

Development Tools – Kinetis Design Studio can be used for the Thread development (it’s free of charge). Also the IAR Systems can be used for the Thread development. However, this needs a license.

Radio testing – You can use a USB dongle with the RF sniffer firmware. A several USB dongles based on – KW24D, KW41Z or older MC1322x are supported. The program we use for the displaying the radio packets is the Wireshark (free of charge). The example of the setup was already described at https://community.nxp.com/message/441313?sr=search&searchId=a8de3161-9384-445f-bbc1-a1a460c9ebac&sea...‌. Need to mention if you would like to decode the Thread COAP messages and Thread commands, you have to use “special” version of the Wireshark (available for Thread Group members only). A great choice for displaying the radio communication packets is also Ubiqua. However, the license is needed (Ubilogix offers 30 days trial license for testing). I think, currently they don’t have support for the KW41Z USB dongle yet. Older chip versions are supported.

Please, fell free to post additional information.

[joachimk]

Hello,

we want to use the KW41z to integrate our products into a thread network. Do we have to perform the whole certification process again or do we simply have to assign a new end product based on your thread certified KW41z Thread Module/Stack.

What will be the cost for bringing our Thread enabled product to market and which membership is required?

Thanks in advance.

J. Keh