Crossbow Technology has announced a family of kits for Wireless Sensor Networks to accelerate technology evaluation, commercial application development and the set up of WSNs in educational teaching labs. The complexities of wireless communication and incomplete and inflexible offerings often created difficult challenges to deploy WSNs for end-users and developers. The new Crossbow kits contain pre-integrated, packaged hardware and software which reduces installation and set up of WSNs from days to minutes. Users can immediately start evaluating the benefits of WSN technology without the need for any programming or hardware configuration.
Bundled with all kits is MoteView, a PC based application for capturing, visualizing and analyzing sensor data and network management. For developers that go beyond technology evaluation and develop WSN systems or applications, the kits are modular in design and fully supported with Crossbow’s MoteWorks mesh networking software platform. The kits support 433MHz, 868/900MHz and 2.4GHz/IEEE 802.15.4 operation and the sensor nodes and base stations are certified against FCC and CE regulations for operation in most countries worldwide.
More information on the family of kits is available here.
Crossbow Technology has announced the Crossbow Imote2, a hardware platform for wireless sensor network research and development. The Crossbow Imote2 enables a new level of processing performance for wireless sensor networks and is a commercial release of the Intel Mote 2 design licensed from Intel. Integrating a high performance, low power, PXA271 Intel XScale processor and a 802.15.4 radio with a built in 2.4 GHz antenna, the Imote2 provides a platform for advanced, compute intensive wireless sensor network applications such as digital imaging and industrial vibration monitoring.
The PXA271 processor on the Imote2 can be configured to support a low voltage (0.85V), low frequency (13 MHz) mode as well as other scalable processing modes of up to 416 MHz. The 256KB of on-chip SRAM, 32 MB of SDRAM and 32MB of FLASH memory provide several orders of magnitude more resources for memory intensive applications than previous WSN hardware platforms. Power consumption is extremely low making this platform ideally suited for demanding but battery powered applications.
Several I/O and sensor interfaces on the board allow the development and integration of sensor boards that leverage the full capabilities of the Imote2, making it a versatile and flexible platform for a broad range of applications, including imaging, acoustics, seismic and vibration based signal processing. The 802.15.4 standard compliant radio supports a 250kb/s data rate with 16 channels in the 2.4 GHz band. With the integrated 2.4 GHz surface mount antenna, a typical range of 100 feet (30m) is achieved. For longer range requirements an external antenna can be used via an optional SMA connector. Currently, the Imote2 is supported by several operating systems including TinyOS 1.1, TinyOS 2.0, SOS and Linux.
More information on the Imote2 is available here.
Crossbow’s website is http://www.xbow.com/
