Hi everybody.
I am in process of designing a sensor network that includes several independent sensors managed by USB dongle. This USB dongle receives the data from the sensors, stores it in memory and sends the processed data by request to USB CDC for the PC side software.
The PC software is used only to send configure data to the dongle and to log the sensor data to a Database so the USB dongle is required to operate mainly independently from the PC software.
ATM I am planing to use the msp430f5529 for the dongle. Wireless interface is handled by nRF24L01+ SPI module. (cheap, available and two way) I probably have to use some kind of external flash chip for the sensor data storage if there is not enough flash left on the chip. My sensor data consist of two to four unsigned characters per sensor per measurement, so the data requirements aren't huge. Measuring interval is about one hour (this is going to be user specified, but there is rarely any need to increase the measuring interval.).
In future I would like to be able to develop an independent device to manage and store the data from the sensor network. So making the dongle code modular so it is easy to convert to this purpose, would probably make sense.
As I have been coding the prototype the code is getting quite big. I can't help wondering if implementing some sort RTOS would ease my task. So all you experience designer here, if you could give some advice to a beginner, it would be very much appreciated.