The main Sun SPOT hardware itself is now available on Java.net.
You can find it here. At this point all major parts of the Sun SPOT project are open source – hardware, operating system/virtual machine, drivers and libraries, applications, documentation… its all there. It’s all part of the project’s open source which you can find here.
We are happy to announce the first public release of the Re-Mote Testbed Framework featuring code developed in collaboration between DIKU and CIT. The Re-Mote Testbed Framework is a collection of modules for providing remote access to wireless sensor network testbeds. It includes a Java-based GUI client featuring real-time mote interaction using console windows and server-side software consisting of a MySQL database, mote control server, and mote host software.
The major contribution of this release is support for MicaZ and TMote Sky in addition to the original dig528-2 platform. It has
been successfully tested with the two widely used operating systems for WSN: TinyOS and Contiki. To get more information on
the Re-Mote Testbed Framework and the current release, please visit the project development website.
The CPS-CA’08 workshop will be held 11/JUN/2008 in Santorini Island (Greece), in conjunction with the 4th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS’08)
Although the IT transformation in the 20th century appeared revolutionary, a bigger change is probably yet to come. The term Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has come to describe the research and technological effort that will ultimately efficiently allow interlinking the real world physical objects and cyberspace. Actually, a few other terms have been used to describe similar endeavors. The term “Internet of Things”, originally aiming at RFID technologies, is smoothly becoming synonymous for cyber-physical systems. The integration of physical processes and computing is not new. Embedded systems have been in place since a long time to denote systems that combine physical processes with computing. The revolution will come from massively networking embedded computing devices which will allow instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks of sensor-rich, embedded computation.
The 7th International Workshop on Real-Time Networks (RTN’08) is a satellite workshop to the 20th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS’08), both to be held in the beautiful city of Prague, Czech Republic, during the first week of July.
ECRTS is one of the most important conferences in real-time and embedded computing systems. RTN is a very interactive and informal <>one day workshop, leading to very active, fruitful, hot and polemic discussions among both young and experienced researchers in the fields of real-time, reliable, pervasive and interoperable communication networks. This year’s edition of RTN will particularly focus on “Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications”.
More info at RTN’08 web site and at ECRTS’08 web site.
Submission deadline: 21 April 2008
On May 12th, Luca Mottola and Gian Pietro Picco will give a tutorial on “Programming Wireless Sensor Networks: From Theory to Practice” at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’08), in Leipzig (Germany). The tutorial includes a hands-on session on real WSN hardware!
Read more here. Early registration ends April 2nd.
The ability to scatter lots of wireless sensors over a wide area has tremendous potential, whether it’s tracking the melting of a glacier, the stress on a bridge span or the temperature in your home. The trick? Making them cheap enough so you can use plenty, and having them last long enough so you don’t break the bank or your back changing batteries (those trips to the glacier add up). This week, Microsoft showed us a prototype version of a wireless sensor that tackles both challenges.
The sensors shown at Microsoft’s TechFest (the company’s annual science fair) run on a pair of AA batteries for up to four years. And while they didn’t have cost estimates for a final production model, the basic data processing/radio transmitter chips from TI sell for only about $3 each.
More info here.
From Bruno Giussani’s blog:
Question: how much do you know about the quality of your own, personal, local climate? Do you know the concentration of CO2 in the air you’re breathing, in the air that people are breathing in your neighborhood or city?
I’m pretty sure your answer is “no”. These data aren’t collected at that micro scale, and even when they are collected (by public authorities, research entities or private firms) they aren’t generally made easily available.
That’s the premise behind my friend Leandro (Leeander) Agrò’s OpenSpime idea, which he and his small team at WideTag Inc in Turin, Italy, are turning into both a product and, hopefully soon, a movement.
A “spime” (the word — a contraction of “space” and “time” — was coined by sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling) is an object that, thanks to GPS and sensors, is aware of where and when it is, and can record and communicate these data. OpenSpimes are designed to allow everyone to record and visualize environmental (or other) data, to store them, publish them, blog them, compare them, mix and mash them up.
More info here.
EuroSSC was held before in Enschede (NL) and Kendal (UK). Building on the success of the last years, 3rd European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context (EuroSSC 2008) will include a highly selective single-track program for technical papers, accompanied by posters, demonstrations, invited speakers, and an industrial panel. Topics include (but are not limited to):
* Distributed smart sensing and context recognition
* Context processing
* Context-aware actuators, interaction methods, and human aspects
* Applications, deployment, test beds and case studies
EuroSSC 2008 will be held on October 29-31 in Zurich, Switzerland.
Paper submission is on June 6, 2008. For more information, please visit the conference website at http://www.eurossc.org/
From Crossbow’s blog:
Can you imagine a place where the temperature can get to -82°C? A place without sunlight for half the year. Imagine a frozen desert with no permanent human population – the coldest, driest and windiest continent on earth… It is in this place that research scientists from the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have deployed a wireless sensing system using Crossbow’s Mote platforms. Being a resident of sunny California I can barely fathom such an environment. If the temperature drops below 50°F (10°C), I want a cup of hot chocolate and a fire to cuddle in front of. Imagine being in a place where the climate is so harsh – there are no plants or animals. Talk about extreme sensing!
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are quickly gaining popularity in both military and civilian applications. However, WSN is especially vulnerable against external and internal attacks due to its particular characteristics. It is necessary to provide WSN with basic security mechanisms and protocols that can guarantee a minimal protection to the services and the information flow. This means the hardware layer needs to be protected against node compromise, the communication channels should meet certain security goals (like confidentiality, integrity and authentication), and the protocols and services of the network must be robust against any possible interference.
This book by J. Lopez and J. Zhou provides a deep overview of the major security issues that any WSN designers have to face, and also gives a comprehensive guide of existing solutions and open problems. The book is targeted for the semi-technical readers (technical managers, graduate students, engineers) as well as the specialists. They will get a clear picture regarding what security challenges they will face and what solutions they could use in the context of wireless sensor networks. They will also benefit from the cutting-edge research topics being presented.
More info about this book here.
