There is a new link estimator for TinyOS 2.0 now that significantly improves on the previous link estimation techniques. More information in this technical report.

China represents the fastest growing market globally with a population of over 1.3 billion people and has maintained two digits economic growth rate since last twenty years. At the beginning of 2007, there are approximately 348 million electricity meters, 200 million water meters and nearly 100 million gas meters installed in the whole country of China.  Since the fast development of China metering industry in the last ten years, metering practices are undergoing radical changes in the wave of the energy market reform and development.

The new situation with enlarged meter park in China requires that the metering devices are to be automatically read and the measured data are to be timely transmitted to the utilities for improving the quality of customer services and the level of the installed meter park management. The utilities want to improve their services and enhance internal operation management by having the real-time data communication from the meters. These are the reasons why Chinese utilities are drafting or modifying their Enterprise metering standards, and installing pilot AMR projects in different areas, as well as standardizing their technical (including functional) specifications for different market segments.

Message from the State Power Grid Corp of China and South China Power Grid has indicated since the beginning of this year that they are planning to accelerate the construction of “Energy Data Collection and Energy Management” systems, following which, Heilongjiang provincial power Company announced an investment plan of 260 Million USD for constructing their whole province metering reading system. More, Guangdong provincial power company indicated to totally upgrade their system by replacing 11 million meters. These are only part of the picture, several other provincial power are making aggressive progress in these changes.

In Chinese water utilities, similar changes are happening, especially in large cities such as Tianjin, Dalian, Shanghai, Chongqing and Guangzhou etc. Pilot AMR projects have been installed since five years and obtained rich experience, further implementation has been indicated.

As the completion of China “West to East” Natural Gas Transmission Line in 2005, and the fast growing market demand in the Chinese utility market, smart metering concept has gradually been recognized in Chinese gas utility industry. AMR systems have been installed in some smart residential houses.

The first AMRChina 2007 International Symposium, to be held from 13 to 15 November 2007 in Beijing, is specially designed to focus on Chinese AMR market development in electricity, water and gas utilities. There will be multi conference sessions, world-class AMR product display, China AMR Study Tour and more than 20 top level speakers invited from both China utilities and international metering industry. With an expected 150 organizations and 800+ utility executives and metering professionals from both China and international metering fields to participate in this event.
More info at the conference site

The wireless metering and control technology known as ZigBee is gaining more traction. In Sweden , the city of Gothenburg is on the verge of becoming the first city to use ZigBee to read meters. The city’s energy company, Goteborg Energi AB, is working with Nuri AiMiR AMM Systems to install ZigBee meter readers to monitor the city’s 270,000 homes.

And GreenPeak Technologies has announced new products, which promise ultra-low-power wireless sense and control networks. The products enable battery-free networks without any cables, according to CEO Cees Link.

“The strength of a truly wireless sensor network can only be fully utilized when the wiring for both the data communications and power cables can be eliminated,” he says.

More info here.

The beta version of the Sun SPOT SDK v3.0 (purple) beta has just been released. There are many technical improvements, but what is really interesting is the new application currently called SPOTWorld. It is a new class of program that helps you to manage a network of wireless motes. It gives you graphical and list views of the Sun SPOTs in your radio vicinity. Using this I can see the Sun SPOTs in and near my office, or I can increase the hop count and use the mesh networking to discover about Sun SPOTs that are around. The built in security only allows me to manipulate the devices that I am the “owner” of, however, I can see that the other devices are there. With this interface I can manipulate the devices I own. I can download new applications and libraries to individual Sun SPOTs, over the air, as well as run and pause individual applications. I can now get a plethora of information about each individual Sun SPOT.

You can now run your programs on emulated Sun SPOTs. That’s right, you can now develop, build and run applications in SPOTWorld without any actual physical Sun SPOTs. The emulator is fairly primitive at this point, but it does allow you to write code and simulate changes to the sensors. It also simulates radio communication between the emulated Sun SPOTs. The most amazing part of all is that these emulated Sun SPOTs can also communicate through a base station to real Sun SPOTs in the physical world. This means that your developer kit that includes a base station and two full Sun SPOTs can simulate a network of a dozen Sun SPOTs that all interact with each other. Its all quite cool.

More info on Roger Meike’s blog.