# TinyOS Reviews **Vendor:** GitHub **Category:** [IoT Operating Systems](https://www.g2.com/categories/iot-operating-systems) **Average Rating:** 4.0/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 25 ## About TinyOS TinyOS is an open source, BSD-licensed operating system designed for low-power wireless devices, such as those used in sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, personal area networks, smart buildings, and smart meters. ## TinyOS Reviews ### 1. Great OS for WSN research **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 01, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Simple yet efficient OS design, nice support to network protocols. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** The nesC language may be not too intuitive for beginners. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used TinyOS in a number of research papers focused on online embedded anomaly detection algorithms for WSNs, as well as for studying the energy impact of routing protocols in WSNs. ### 2. A didactic but dated OS for embedded systems **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Victor C. | Senior Researcher - Networked Embedded Systems, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 24, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** TinyOS is developed in the nesC language which is quite different from C. Instead of the traditional C application that has a main function from which the entire functionality develops, TinyOS applications are more similar to component-orientated systems. An application is a collection of components that implement interfaces and are connected through those interfaces. In this way TinyOS makes the developer more aware of the interaction between components (hardware and software) than if developing a sequential C application. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Development in TinyOS is difficult to grasp for someone schooled in C or Java, and for this reason it has lost momentum in favour of more traditional C-based real time OSs such as Contiki, Riot, etc. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** TinyOS is dated. It hasn't received any support for years now. The team that was maintaining TinyOS has now moved on to Tock OS, and Contiki OS is the preferred OS for embedded systems research nowadays. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main purpose of TinyOS is research and development of embedded systems applications. I have used TinyOS to develop Medium Access Control protocols, routing protocols, security protocols, power management algoirthms, and holistic security architectures for low power embedded devices. I have also developed or contributed to the development of file system drivers. I have implemented different types of applications, from multi-sensorial falls detection applications to an application that plays "Jingle bells". ### 3. Worked on improvement of dissemination protocol using Fuzzy logic and implemented on IRIS motes. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Viraj P. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 05, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Kernel less, event driven- components based architecture allowing direct hardware manipulation. extremely small footprint and low system overhead. Very ideal platform for power-constrained applications. Single stack for both function calls and interrupts. Strong libraries supporting every possible protocol required for wireless sensor networks. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** I am not sure about current support of TinyOS. But when I worked on TinyOS back in 2014 for my sensor network application, TinyOS was pretty new and I found a high learning curve considering lack of online support or tutorials. Initially, I found difficulty installing and configuring TinyOS environment on my primary OS (i.e. Linux) . So, I consider the initial high learning curve to understand the TinyOS architecture and its libraries, very crucial part to continue the journey of sensor networks application design. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I worked on implementing decision based control mechanism to improve dissemination by designing cross layer architecture with the help of MATLAB and TinyOS libraries. This protocol design was implemented on IRIS motes to test the functionality of the design. ### 4. Out of the box mesh networking **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rajeev P. | Wireless System Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** TinyOS provides out-of-the-box multi-hop networking or better known as collection tree protocol for ZigBee devices. Take one of the supported devices of TinyOS, compile their example application, and get your network up and running within a few minutes. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** TinyOS has a bit of a learning curve and might be overwhelming for new users unfamiliar with wireless networks or sensor network programming on energy and resource constraint devices. Also, for many years, the support for TinyOS has stopped and no new features or platforms are being supported. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing ultra-low-power networked systems using TinyOS for micro-climate monitoring applications. The main benefits are the ability to configure various network and Zigbee radio parameters to achieve low-power sensor networks. ### 5. Using TInyOS with TelosB Motes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Navaneeth M. | Educator and Mentor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** NesC programming is easy and intuitive. Also, TinyOs gives fine-grain control over the entire protocol stack. And the yeti2 plugin for eclipse also quite useful. Everything is modifiable and custom functionalities can be added easily. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** No proper documentation and support for a wide range of hardware modules. Also, the development for TinyOS of the main repo is quite old. Expecting reboot of tinyOs with more advanced and latest features. Community support is needed. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tried to tweak the Zigbee protocol, worked quite well. ### 6. TinyOS in wireless sensors **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dushyant T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** TinyOS helped me understand the various functions of sensors. Visualizations helped me a lot. TinyOS simplifies the work on motes a lot. It gives us the platform to work on instead of just coding in raw linux. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** There's room for improvement in the user interface. The wavelength display can be good. The clicks can be good. If TinyOS can be more compatible with windows, it would be great for non-linux users. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** Tutorials are very important **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used tinyOS in my Master's course on wireless sensors. I use calibration of the sensors and many other functions of sensors. Used to see the wavelength, patterns, and more attributes of the sensors. ### 7. Most energy conservative approach for building Wireless Sensor technology **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arjun K. | Network Support Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 27, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The combination of TinyOS being modular, Low power consumption along with event-driven based was perfect use case for our project. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** The only dislike with TinyOS is using NesC which is difficult programming language to develop efficient and fast code. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** TinyOS provides the most power efficient way on developing WSN/ IoT based approach. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used TinyOS to develop various modules for wireless sensor device consisting of temperature, humidity and Carbon Monoxide sensor. Which helped gather data from large warehouses for cold storage monitoring of food supplies. ### 8. Academic and Research **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The documentation and the fact that it is opensource. The online community around it is resourceful. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** the fact that it is written in nesC which is a small learning curve. Although basic knowledge of Functional Language should be god enough to get you through. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** perfect tool to learn about wireless sensors in the age where IoT is a burgeoning industry. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** academic uses to make prototype Wireless Sensor Network is a huge usecase for TinyOS. I used wireless communication concepts like multi-hops to develop a low-energy solution for a car alarm. ### 9. It works as needed but more research needed **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Madni Maksud V. | Software Developer Engineer II, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 29, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** I have limited knowledge as I interacted with it on simulator. It loads quickly **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** I guess it can improve on security and further battery optimizations **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used it for testing some algorithms on wireless sensors but I used nesC to load. It was enough for my need but for industry usage further analysis is needed ### 10. My journey with TinyOS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishnu S. | Associate Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The ability to program and configure wireless network devices with it is very simple **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Would be great if more people would be writing up some blogs and user guides. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was looking at connection between sensors accross an area and have them work together. TinyOS was able to help in making this kinda system work for me. ### 11. Operating system for wireless sensor networks **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The power tossim simulator that offers an accurate emulator for power consumption for selected hardware platforms. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** It is not supported by a broad open source community. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** A well maintained and advanced alternatives to Tiny OS is Riot-OS. It support a much broader number of hardware platform and there is a open-source community that supports the platform. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Development of communication protocols for wireless sensor networks. The ability to emulate using tossim the developed software in a very simple way is a definite plus. Also the tool power-tosssim provides accurate estimations of the power consumption of the protocol for selected hardware platforms. ### 12. It was very usefull to develop lot of projects using IITH Mote **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** AMARLINGAM M. | Postdoctoral Researcher, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** It requires very low on-chip memory for dumping the code. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** NesC scripting is little difficult to understand, but once any one gets hands on they enjoy. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I developed smart home, pollution monitoring and acoustic navigation system prototypes using tinyOS and IITH Mote. Further, I developed test-bed for analyzing various 3d localization algorithms for wireless sensor networks using the tinyOS. ### 13. Researcher and developer of a wireless sensor security protocol **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jalal k. | IT Project Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** It is modular and any one with basic knowledge of C can use it without any effort **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Resource material is not widely available and you struggle to find TinyOS community **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Implementation of private public key encryption protocol. Implementation on physical motes is convenient. ### 14. TinyOS for WSN **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pradeepa R. | Subject Matter Expert - Automation, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Easy and light weight coding environment designed for low power wireless devices. Component based programming language easy to deploy with the motes. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Not support all kind of devices. limited devices only can deploy via TinyOS **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** Good platform for the WSN entry level. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We tried to change a channel of a node or the RF power a node in run time using TinyOS. ### 15. Best architected RTOS for WSN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pavan K. | Module Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Its architecture is comprised of 3 layers HIL, HAL and HPL that enables a developers to design and develop software modules effficiently. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Cant be used for complex application as it lacks effective memory management and multitasking. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lot of benefits for Battery operated nodes it allows mote to sleep most of the time. ### 16. Overall good experience, nice idea with wiring and support for multiple devices **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 01, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Overall idea and environment idea is great. Love the nesc idea of wiring, this makes the system easier to connect big components while maintaining the low level of access with c **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Debugging might be hard or at least not well documented. More project examples could be created as documentation for quick start. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used for wireless sensor network of shimmer devices for medical data acquisition ### 17. Easy to use open source platform with lots of community help **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Open source code. Extensive Online support. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Not much provided on hardware limitation for Mica2 on tinyOS platform Documentation on Initial Setup and troubleshooting for platform setup is scarce. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** providing a current implementation of the flooding time synchronization protocol on hardware that is available and a platform that can support that. The problem was the ability to recreate the same results the author of the protocol had gotten in this day and age with the current hardware and software that we have available to us ### 18. Developing Wireless Network Sensor with TinyOS was easy and useful **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christian H. | Software Product Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** Developing with TinyOS is very simple and flexible **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** As many other codes it has some limitations. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** Using TinyOS is simple and efficient. Consider using it for ressearch and development in your projects **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Simulation of real wireless sensor networks to find the data traffic and network efficiency ### 19. I love TinyOS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The small TinyOS foot print is very efficient and very suitable for mass deployment of sensors and IoT devices. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** For the type of mass deployment application, the small footprint and efficient code execution TinyOS is most suited. So there was nothing to dislike. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Home Automation; Temperature and humidity sensors, ### 20. Useful for embedded simulations **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The os is easy to use and learn. Implementing functionalities on go is straightforward. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Too much dependencies to set it up. Perhaps could be bundled in one package **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** Very efficient and lightweight OS. Very useful for studying embedded network **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Networked Embedded system simulations ### 21. I had experience with tiny os in 2008 **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2021 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** That is very simple and easy to learn.there are plenty of docs available **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** There are some restrictions with tiny os.nesc is the biggest disadvantage of tiny os **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used this for a road pothole detection programm ### 22. Good tool for Wireless sensor network Research **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** I like the programming in tinyOS. and playing with hardware motes. you see the result as soon as you dump your code on hardware. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Sometime a small error can make you crazy. **Recommendations to others considering TinyOS:** Recommended **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I did my master thesis. which was enhancing communication among WSN nodes. I also published a journal paper from my work. ### 23. Academia Friendly **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** It has a very tidy construct for setting up different node systems, which makes it easy to implement various protocols **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** User startup guide is sometimes confusing **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Setting up a communication protocol with handshake. It has great benefits in analysing race conditions ### 24. TinyOS is a light weight OS for resource constrained controllers **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Dairy | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2020 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The object oriented concepts and modular design approach. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Supports only limited no of MCU architectures. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used serial communication with datalink and transport layer stack of the tinyos. ### 25. Review for TINY OS **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vijaya karthik K. | Student , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2019 **What do you like best about TinyOS?** The API available for implementing WSN is more and makes it very comparable with other WSN OS like Contiki etc. The OS supports multiple applications which help to add various interesting functionalities to the project. This was great in the implementation of WSN projects. **What do you dislike about TinyOS?** Some Functionalities which we tried to implement is very hard to implement. We have to think of an alternative way to complete our project including that functionality of WSN simulation. The Tiny OS already has a free simulator for WSN but it failed to work for our project. I am not sure whether it was a configuration problem. **What problems is TinyOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I did my senior year project using Tiny OS in designing Wireless sensor networks. ## TinyOS Discussions - [Nothing](https://www.g2.com/discussions/35518-nothing) - 1 upvote - [View TinyOS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/tinyos/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-04+17%3A44%3A06+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e57ed495-0734-4f3d-868c-1f91536e004a&secure%5Btoken%5D=3727e5cfb22dabf29385cde1758ccc1560ae65649ec74756c5b5a4190568b4f4&format=llm_user) ## TinyOS Features **Security** - Access Controls - Network Security - Compliance - Cryptography ## Top TinyOS Alternatives - [Windows for IoT](https://www.g2.com/products/windows-for-iot/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (19 reviews) - [Amazon FreeRTOS](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-freertos/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (12 reviews) - [Nucleus RTOS](https://www.g2.com/products/nucleus-rtos/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (19 reviews)