GENeric Radio IP

I recently tried out GENRIP, a kernel driver designed specifically for Linux. This tool makes it possible to carry ethernet frames over generic low-speed or low-power serial radios such as Microhard's MHX series. I discovered that the main purpose of GENRIP is to speed up the development cycle for people creating low-powered Embedded telemetry and SCADA devices. The tool is helpful in other settings as well.

Once installed, the serial radio appears as a network interface, which I found as a great feature. This is useful when you want to visualize the result of the work done. With the command shown below, you can easily view this feature.

[root@lindev]# ./ifconfig gr0 gr0 Link encap:Generic Radio IP HWaddr 00:00:02:04:06:08 inet addr:192.168.15.1 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP RUNNING MTU:234 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:30 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

It is essential to note that GENRIP was originally based on Stuart Cheshire's STRIP driver, which is part of the Mobile Computing Group at Stanford University's Mosquitonet project. However, it has gone through radical modifications since then. GENRIP was ported to this application by Lawrence Wimble of Design On Demand, Inc. The company also maintains GENRIP and is willing to assist with any embedded project using GENRIP.

Lastly, GENRIP is released for Linux under the GPL license, but a port to FreeBSD is anticipated in the future. After using GENRIP, I found it to be an incredible tool for low-powered Embedded telemetry and SCADA devices.