Getting Started with Thread

Introduction

Thread is a secure, wireless mesh networking protocol. The Thread stack is an open standard that is built upon a collection of existing Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, rather than a whole new standard.

For more information about Thread SDK, see UG103.11 .

Product Overview

Development hardware (see http://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/mesh-networking/thread/Pages/thread.aspx for more information)
Mighty Gecko (EFR32MG) Mesh Networking Kit or
EM35x Development Kit
Required software components, as described below. A card included in your development hardware kit contains a link to a Getting Started page, which will direct you to links for the Silicon Labs software products.

Note : If you are installing an EM3x development kit, do not install Ember Desktop as documented in the Quick Start Guide. Instead, install Simplicity Studio as noted below.

Software Components

See the stack release notes for version restrictions and compatibility constraints for the stack and these components. To develop Silicon Labs Thread applications, you will need the following. Installation instructions are provided in the section Install Simplicity Studio and the Silicon Labs Thread Stack:

IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM (IAR-EWARM) 7.80, used as a compiler in the Simplicity Studio development environment. Download the supported version from the Silicon Labs Support Portal, as described at the end of section Install Simplicity Studio and the Silicon Labs Thread Stack. Refer to the “QuickStart Installation Information” section of the IAR installer for additional information about the installation process and how to configure your license. Once IAR-EWARM is installed, the next time Simplicity Studio starts it will automatically detect and configure the IDE to use IAR-EWARM.
The Simplicity Studio version 4 development environment, which incorporates AppBuilder. If you do not have version 4, download it here . AppBuilder is an interactive GUI tool that allows you to configure a body of Silicon Labs-supplied code to implement applications. Online help for AppBuilder and other Simplicity Studio modules is provided.
The Silicon Labs Thread stack, an advanced implementation of a wireless protocol stack, installed through Simplicity Studio. The stack API is documented in online API reference as well as other documents available through Simplicity Studio. The stack is delivered as a collection of libraries that you can link to your applications. A description of each library is provided in the development environment. The release notes contain details on the folders installed along with their contents.
Simplicity Commander, installed along with Simplicity Studio. A GUI with limited functionality can be accessed through Simplicity Studio’s Tools menu. Most functions are accessible through a CLI invoked by opening a command prompt in the Simplicity Commander directory ().

For more information about Thread installation, see QSG113 .

API Sets

The Thread API Reference documentation for the EM35x and EFR32x includes the following API sets: