New products, Conferences, Books, Papers, Internet of Things

Archive for January, 2008

Radiocrafts AS and Sensinode Ltd. announce 6LoWPAN wireless IPv6-network solutions

Radiocrafts AS, a leading supplier of wireless RF modules for communication in the license-free frequency bands, and Sensinode Ltd., a pioneering/commercial supplier of solutions for IPv6 over wireless mesh networks, today launch a new platform for integrating the Internet with sensor networks.

The IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio modules from Radiocrafts combined with the 6LoWPAN compliant NanoStack from Sensinode offers integrators super compressed IPv6 over low power radios in a very compact module solution. The use of end-to-end open source IP technology over a proven radio platform provides an excellent and scalable solution for IP-based monitoring and control systems like AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) and WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks).

(more…)

Category:

wsn-general, wsn-products

Sun SPOT project has gone open source

Sun announced that the Sun SPOT project has gone open source. It’s now available at http://spots.dev.java.net. Additionally they announced widespread availability of Sun SPOTs (36 countries and counting) as well as deep discounts for education (see the Sun educational sales rep for details).

The full press release is available here.

Category:

wsn-general, wsn-products

Vest May Help Understand Causes of Asthma Attacks

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a sensor system that continuously monitors the air around persons prone to asthma attacks. Worn in the pockets of a vest, the new system could help researchers understand the causes of asthma attacks.

“We are investigating whether we can go back after an asthma attack and see what was going on environmentally when the attack started,” said Charlene Bayer, a GTRI principal research scientist.

More info here.

Category:

wsn-general

Arduino and XBee Battery Test Results

Some real-world battery life results for Arduino projects and XBee mesh networking radios have been published. Use them to help choose which battery setup is right for your project.

All tests have been performed at room temperature with nominally fresh or fully charged batteries. Tests with multiple run times are intended to give a sense of the potential for variance in the results. Results were monitored in a program that keeps track of the first and last time it receives bytes on the serial port.

The results are available here.

Category:

wsn-general

Presentation on Sentilla

Joe Polastre, co-founder and CTO of Sentilla, gave a presentation on Pervasive Computing with Java at the latest Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days. Sentilla is about making the real world — and everything in it — smarter, with software for small computers that can be put anywhere or attached to anything. Called pervasive computing, this technology is applied in wide-ranging industries such as logistics, transportation, security, health care, agriculture and green technology. Founded in 2003, Sentilla Corporation provides a full life cycle software platform for developing, deploying, integrating and managing pervasive computing applications with the familiarity of Java technology. Sentilla’s mission is to enable the billions of very small computers deployed throughout the physical world to work together to solve really big business problems.

The presentation is available here.

Category:

wsn-general, wsn-products

Squark JVM is now Open Source

Yesterday at the Java ME developer days Sun announced that the Squawk JVM has been made open source.
For those of you keeping track, this is the JVM used in Sun SPOTs motes.

The code and more info are available on Java.net.

Eric Arseneau, PI of the project gave a talk today at the JME Dev Days conference which you can see here.

Category:

wsn-general

In Memory of Cormac Duffy

We recently got to know about the untimely and tragic death of a fellow sensornets researcher Cormac Duffy. Cormac was working towards his PhD at Univ. College Cork, Ireland and his representative works include “Adding Preemption to TinyOS” (EmNets’07) and “Improving the Energy Efficiency of the MANTIS Kernel” (EWSN’07). He was an extremely lively person and had many friends in the sensornet research community, who are shocked by his death. Cormac died on Aug 17th 2007 in a car accident in Poland. The picture below is from the Dagstuhl Summer School on WSN. Cormac is on the floor, signing and reading lyrics projected on the roof of a Dagstuhl Castle room in Sep 2005. The lyrics read:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

 cormac.jpg

Rest in peace Cormac, you will be deeply missed by your friends and colleagues in the sensornet research community.

Category:

wsn-general

EWSN Tutorial: Computing in the Real World with Java

Speaker: Joe Polastre, Sentilla ltd. (USA)

Abstract: Pervasive Computing is about making the real world — and everything in it — smarter, through the use of small, wireless, battery-powered computers (often called “motes”) that can be put anywhere or attached to anything. By moving beyond wireless sensing to a full computing environment, pervasive applications can revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. Conventional wisdom asserts that low-power resource-constrained systems are incapable of running fully featured computing environments, such as Java. This talk shows the basic architecture of a pervasive computer, a Java Micro Edition (JavaME) platform extended to pervasive computing by Sentilla, and techniques for developing and debugging applications distributed across large numbers of pervasive computers.

More details about this and other tutorials at EWSN’08 here

Category:

wsn-conferences, wsn-general, wsn-products

WSN in China

The December 2007 issue of IEEE Wireless Communications features an interesting paper on “China’s national research project on wireless sensor networks”, by Ni, L.M.; Liu, Y.; Zhu, Y. It describes the National 973 project in China that was launched in September 2006.

You can visit the program’s homepage at http://wsn.973program.org/. They have also released a sensor network OS called Senspire. These pages are all in Chinese, no English version yet.

An interesting blog on WNS with entries about applications in China is Weiwei’s Study blog.

Category:

wsn-general

From 7.5th floor:

Data management in the worldwide sensor web draws the big picture in mentioning that now too much attention has been placed on the networking issues of distributed sensing and too little on tools to manage, analyze and understand the data. The authors ask the question weather we can design sensor networks with data quality in mind? They ask a very crucial question, but as often in location-aware computing, it is very unclear on who can claim what quality in location information is or in other words who can answer “how good is good enough?”. Of course it is important to manage temporal and spatial data and handle their inherent uncertainty (e.g. via probabilistic theory) or mask it (e.g. via interpolation) or play with it (seamful design). It seems clear now that my thesis is about acknowledging that situation (uncertainty in the location information, fluctuant quality in the data), but instead of aiming to produce “perfect data”, I plan to provide an understanding and solutions from a human and urban perspective. It comes, at the first place, with the observation of people experiencing location-aware systems in CatchBob!, and making use of location information, in my taxi driver (co-evolution, context and granularity). This observations help me accumulating evidences on the contextual factors influencing the granularity (≈human expectation of quality) of the location information used.

Balazinska, M., Deshpande, A., Franklin, M. J., Gibbons, P. B., Gray, J., Hansen, M., Liebhold, M., Nath, S., Szalay, A., and Tao, V. (2007). Data management in the worldwide sensor web. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(2):30–40.

Category:

wsn-general, wsn-papers

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