Spark Integration Technologies Blog - Spark Integration Technologies - Wireless Sensor Network Design Patterns. The concept of "patterns" in software development has evolved as a means of documenting and formalizing techniques for solving certain classes of problems. A pattern typically begins with a problem statement and then describes a general solution to the problem. From this, a software developer may apply the pattern to their particular variant of the problem. Wireless sensor networks, which can consist of hundreds or thousands of low power nodes that must communicate and coordinate in order to achieve a complex task, have their own sets of problems and, increasingly, their own set of applicable design patterns. Some of these patterns have been taken from the library of existing software design patterns and applied to the challenges of constructing wireless sensor networks. For example, the mediator pattern traditionally solves the problem of high coupling between the many classes of a complex system by routing communication between the classes through a mediator class.
Air quality. Intel’s Sensors Will Warn You About Running Outside When The Air Is Polluted Imagine a network of air quality monitors that kept you constantly up to date about big gusts of bad air. It’s on its way, and it might be partly powered by your own phone. Imagine: you’re gearing up to take a jog along your regular route when an app on your smartphone pushes out a message: air pollution levels are high in the park where you like to run, so maybe you should try a recommended route that’s cleaner today.
It doesn’t sound incredibly far-fetched; many cities already have pollution and weather sensors. But they’re usually located on top of buildings, far from human activity. Intel has developed sensors that can be placed closer to the ground–on lamp posts and traffic lights, for example–to create what Intel senior principal engineer Terry O’Shea calls “a community-based approach to sensing.” Intel is piloting a deployment of its pollution and weather sensors within a month in Dublin, Ireland.
Sensor Networks | SQLstream – Real-time Big Data. The Tutorial blog series helps SQLstream developers build streaming SQL applications. This blog is the second in the Geospatial Visualization tutorial. The first blog in the series set out the streaming use case for connecting SQLstream to a Google Earth visualization, and described the initial steps required to capture the data and create a display list using Rails. In the second part of this tutorial, we’re going to discuss the meat of the application – how to render the display list.
Rendering the Display List To keep Google Earth continuously updated with the data flowing from SQLstream we’ll have to serve two different KML files: one will contain a KML Placemark for each quake, and the other gives the URL of the quakes feed and tells GE to continuously refresh it (in KML, this is the NetworkLink). We’re going to be serving compressed KML to cut down on the transmission time, so we’ll need the rubyzip gem we installed earlier included in our web app. Gem 'rubyzip' 1 +<? 1 <? Wireless sensor broadcasts environmental data via Twitter. Tsubuyaku Sensor is a new wireless device from Japanese Ubiquitous Computing Technology that monitors conditions such as temperature, humidity and radiation levels and automatically tweets the resulting data via Twitter. If Twitter can be used to broadcast recipes, school lunch menus and fresh bread alerts — to name just a few of the many examples we’ve covered — then why not environmental data as well?
That, indeed, is just what’s possible with the Tsubuyaku Sensor, a new wireless device from Japanese Ubiquitous Computing Technology that monitors conditions such as temperature, humidity and radiation levels and automatically tweets the resulting data via Twitter. Targeted primarily at applications including food warehouses and wine cellars, the Tsubuyaku Sensor measures data including temperature, humidity or radiation levels and can then automatically broadcast it to Twitter, according to a recent TechCrunch report. Is there any end to the remote monitoring possibilities? Like this: A "Minimal" Arduino/XBee/Pachube Sensor Network. One or two people have asked in online forums for code from my sensor network, and while I'm usually happy to share, it's full of a lot of extraneous stuff (RTCs, NTP, displays, thermocouples) that might not be of interest to everyone, but more importantly, that probably only obscures the fundamentals of XBee networking and communicating with Pachube.
So with that in mind, I cut out the extraneous stuff, and just left the bare essentials: A remote sensor unit which transmits a single reading from a photocell once per minute to a base unit which connects to the internet and forwards the data on to Pachube. XBee configuration: XBee configuration is same as above, except: Load the Zigbee Router API firmware (I'm using Version 2370).Here are the sketches. Here is the Pachube feed. Note that in the following wiring diagrams, the XBees plug into the Adafruit adapter, which in turn plugs into the breadboard. Arduino. TinyDuino Microcontroller Is Smaller Than a Quarter Arduino is probably the world’s most popular open source physical computing platform. The little microcontrollers show up in everything from wild art projects to serious home automation efforts. It’s great and all, but couldn’t it be … smaller? Electrical engineer Ken Burns thought so, and got to work on the TinyDuino. TinyDuino is a fully Arduino-compatible hardware platform, complete with expansion shields (add-on boards that have specific sensors or lights, for you non-robot designers).
The seeds of TinyDuino were planted when Burns was working on creating smart sensors. Burns says that Arduino was a natural fit as a basis for the work. The TinyDuino is an exercise in design extremes. “If you look at the board itself,” says Burns, “it’s really just a core processor that brings out signals to pins.” More info here and here. 5 ways to power the Internet of things. WiFi Sensor Network | Jim Hannon's Blog. I have been slowly building the infrastructure needed for Otter Creek Research Station, my long term amateur science project.
The basic concept is to have a variety of atmospheric condition sensors continuously recording data and made available on a web site. The sensor platform will be located some distance from the house so there is a need to communicate the data back to the home network. The platform will be a bit further away than the maximum length allowed for an Ethernet cable so some sort of radio link is needed. I bought a wireless access point and set it up in my office and tested the range with my cell phone. It gives good signals out past where I will locate the sensor platform. If need be I can add some directional antennas. SparkFun sells a little module by Roving Networks (RV-XN) that is a WiFi radio and processor. I am currently working with a development setup using the RV-XN to get the bugs worked out and understand what I will need to use it. Pyranometer Head References: Open-Source Hardware Association! Open-source hardware has seen a number of exciting development over the past few years: the open hardware summit, the open-source hardware definition, an open-source hardware logo, and, of course, lots of great new open-source hardware products.
Many of the people behind these efforts have been working together to establish an lasting framework for the promotion of open-source hardware and the coordination of these kinds of community initiatives. I’m very happy to share the news that this initiative has found a home in the newly-announced Open-Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). The association was set up and the initial board members selected by a working group which also included myself, Tom Igoe, and Massimo Banzi (of Arduino); Ayah Bdeir, co-founder of the Open Hardware Summit, founder of littlebits, and instigator of many of the above community initiatives; and many others (listed in the OSHWA FAQ). Read more about the Open-Source Hardware Association here.
Like this: Android. Valarm offers an affordable remote sensor and monitoring solution for Android devices Los Angeles-based startup Valarm has packed powerful data collection capabilities into its Android app in order to help consumers and commercial users create custom remote monitoring solutions for less.
The app’s not exactly something you’d buy on a whim, though, as the standard app costs $9.98 on Google Play. A classic version of the app that works on older Android devices (before version 3.1) is available for $2.98, but it lacks support for external USB sensors. The idea behind Valarm is that you can go out and buy a cheap Android smartphone, or use an extra one you have lying around the house, to create a monitoring rig that matches your needs.
Gonzalez and his brother, Edward Pultar, then decided to take the resulting app and turn it into Valarm. Valarm is already plenty useful as a standalone app because of the built-in sensors on today’s smartphones. More info here. It consumes very little power. Sensors to Detect iPhone and Android devices. Wifi. FlyportPro: The ultimate module for IoT/M2M (WI-FI,GPRS,LAN) The IoT (Internet of Things) market is growing fast and manufacturers are rushing to meet the challenge, putting pressure on research and development teams. New products are expected to reach market quickly and at low price points in order to keep up with the competition. “It’s a new era, where service is king. IoT is a brand new stream of business opportunities that create services on top of connected devices. FlyportPRO is a new system-on-module made by openPicus. FlyportPRO has everything needed to manage sensors and actuators: Digital I/Os, Analog channels, a real time clock and memory onboard.
More info here. Welcome Arduino Yún Massimo Banzi announced it some minutes ago during his annual “The state of Arduino” presentation at Maker Faire Bay Area: Arduino Yún is the first of a revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux. More info here. Tiny low-power Wi-Fi module enables Internet of Things. TinyOS. A Decade of TinyOS Development OSDI 2012 has an interesting paper on the evolution of TinyOS over the past 10+ years. It looks at both technical and social decisions that contributed to the success of TinyOS. The paper also looks back and evaluates what worked, what didn’t, and why. It’s rare to see papers at technical conferences talking about the non-technical aspects of large software development projects, so should be an interesting read. You can find the paper here.
New G-Node mote announced SOWNet Technologies has been using TinyOS in production for a while now, and they’ve just released a new development platform, the G-Node. Together with the Technical University of Delft, they’ve also designed a modular test bed with sensor emulation: each test bed unit consists of a mini-PC with an I/O board with dedicated SPI/I2C/UART/ADC connections for up to four nodes. You can find more information here. ETTX 2009 Retrospective TinyOS Technology Exchange comes to Europe More info here. Sensors Use Building's Electrical Wiring as Antenna. Wireless sensors scattered throughout a building can monitor everything from humidity and temperature to air quality and light levels. This seems like a good idea–until you consider the hassle and cost of replacing the sensors’ batteries every couple of years. The problem is that most wireless sensors transmit data in a way that drains battery power. Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a way to reduce the amount of power a sensor uses to transmit data by leveraging the electrical wiring in a building’s walls as an antenna that propagates the signal.
The approach extends a wireless sensor’s range, and it means that its battery can last up to five times longer than existing sensors, say the researchers. “The powerline has an amplification effect,” says Patel. While many low-power sensors only have a range of a few feet, he says, his prototype sensors can cover most of a 3,000-square-foot home. Using powerlines to transmit data is not a new idea. More info here. Wireless Sensor Networks | it-digin's blog. The ZigBee protocol is a popular way of creating wireless sensor networks. It automatically forms networks that can heal themselves and provide routing. Digi International manufactures a wide range of XBee-branded radios. For our sensor network, we will use the series 2 that support the full ZigBee protocol.
Since we are located in Europe, 10mW is the maximum transmission power allowed per device. ZigBee devices can be configured as Coordinator, Router or End Device, depending on their role in the network. An XBee can be connected to sensors and actuators. The coordinator is connected to a microcontroller (a GHI Spider running .NET Micro Framework) that serves as the brain of the sensor network and a gateway to the internet. In addition, some sensors are connected directly to the microcontroller: barometer, light, temperature and current. To access our data, we send it to thingspeak.com. The challenge is to make sense of it all. OpenWireless Sensor Networks in Environment Monitoring with SquidBee.
A WSN Research Group formed by Antoine Bagula, Gordon Inggs, Simon Scott and Marco Zennaro ( WSN Blog ) wrote a complete article about using SquidBee to monitor the environment making Wireles Sensor Networks. This paper revisits the problem of the readiness for field deployments of wireless- sensor networks by assessing the relevance of using Open Hardware and Software motes for environment monitoring. We propose a new prototype wireless sensor network that finetunes SquidBee motes to improve the life-time and sensing performance of an environment monitoring system that measures temperature, humidity and luminosity. Building upon two outdoor sensing scenarios, we evaluate the performance of the newly proposed energy-aware prototype solution in terms of link quality when expressed by the Received Signal Strength, Packet Loss and the battery lifetime.
If you are searching for Wireless Sensor Networks devices (motes) you may be interested in our ready to market sensor platform: Waspmote. New 3G + GPS shield for Arduino. Céu + Wireless Sensor Networks « The Synchronous Blog. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of tiny devices (known as “motes”) that sense the environment and communicate via radio. The image on the right shows two “micaz” motes. The restricted resources of motes and the unlimited possibilities for WSNs applications made this platform an interesting target for Céu [1]. We integrated Céu with TinyOS [2] in order to use the abstracted radio services the operating system already provides.
The following demo uses a fixed ring topology with three motes placed side by side within their radio ranges. The motes should follow the same behavior: receive a message with an integer counter, show it on the leds, wait for 1 second, increment the counter, and forward it to the mote on its right. As the topology constitutes a ring, the counter will be incremented forever while traversing the three motes.
Follows the video for the application executing: The code Let’s start with the code that receives the message and forwards it to the next mote: Conclusion. Projects :: hijack. Electric Imp Takes the ‘Internet of Things’ Mainstream. Complex Insight - Understanding our world. Big Data, Mobile Sensor Networks and You. Wireless image sensor networks | Joel's PhD Blog. IP-USN Blog: Interfacing Sensor Networks with Web 2.0: Twitter and Wordpress. Optimizing Your Wireless Sensor Network « Monnit Wireless Sensor Blog. Wireless sensor network « Future World of Connected Devices.
Wireless sensor network | Spinwave Systems' Blog. Wireless Sensor Networks Blog. Wireless Sensor Networks: Applications & Roadmap « Whiteswami’s Blog. 2010 December. 2011 September. Wireless Sensor Networks Blog on WordPress.com. Research and Practical Sensors and Sensor Networks. Emanuele Della Valle’s Blog » sensor networks. Virtualizing sensor networks | La Cofa - Blog de los empleados de Telefónica I+D. Sensor Networks at UMASS. Harvard Sensor Networks Lab.
Matt Welsh's blog | Harvard Sensor Networks Lab. Wireless Sensor Networks Research Group. Smartgrid.testing-blog. FCC Okays Medical Body Networks. This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor.