Here’s a great talk from Kris Pister Prof. EECS, UC Berkeley, Founder & CTO, Dust Networks. It shows some results from years of experimentation on how to build reliable nets out of nasty unreliable RF channels.

Half of this talk, at CITRIS, is devoted to break down TSMP, a MAC/Network protocol that implements time, space and frequency diversity to provide five 9 reliability communications in a mesh network of sensor nodes.

While some false-starts have limited deployments to date, it seems the dust begins to settle: proven low power solutions for difficult RF environments with multi path interference, thus leading to industry-strength solutions and no site survey installations among different application spaces.

Where are they heading today? Toward a mote on a standard CMOS SoC (~4 mm^2) expected for 2009 and 10 years of battery life out of a coin cell, but then photo-voltaic also potentially embedded in the chip..

The video can be seen here or alternatively you could download (96 MB), watch and keep it, using this tool. Enjoy!

Ann Arbor, MI - Solidica, Inc. announced today the award of a multi-year contract with the United States Marine Corps to integrate its market leading Pantheon^TM embedded diagnostic and health monitoring system into a variety of light armored vehicle-based platforms. Based upon Solidica’s award wining Chorus^TM vehicle network, sensor interface and vehicle telematics module, the project will support the military’s ongoing Condition Based Maintenance and Sense and Respond modernization programs.

For more information click here

The WSN Lab sponsored by Pirelli and Telecom Italia, located in Downtown Berkeley near the University campus, develops wireless sensor networks technologies for applications in automotive, building management, and assisted living.

There are five Internships available, extending between 3 and 6 months.

The Intern will have the opportunity to contribute to the SPINE open source project that is developed by a community of researchers in the academia and the industry. (Options 2, 3 and 4)
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A common scenario for WSN often feature masters or base stations in charge of coordinating the application functionality. Although this centralized approach is appropriate for some applications, there are other situations in which distributed control and processing is necessary to implement more complex control loops. The generalized Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN) is the scope researchers are now exploring to come up with more decentralized architectures that encompass multiple sinks and heterogeneous nodes. In such settings, new programming abstractions are required to manage complexity and heterogeneity without sacrificing efficiency.

Logical Neighborhoods (LN) is a novel programming abstraction for WSNs. A logical neighborhood includes nodes whose dependable roles in the network are specified declaratively, along with requirements about the cost of the communication involved, and regardless of the physical neighbors related to the node’s radio range. This enable the programmer to slice the network according to the application needs, effectively replacing the physical neighborhood with a higher-level, application-defined notion of proximity.

Late last year, at the flagship conference on wireless sensor networks: ACM SenSys 07 held in Sydney, Australia, Luca Mottola and G.P. Picco received the Best Demo Award for the demo “Programming WSN with Logical Neighborhoods: A Road Tunnel Use Case”.
The original LN papers can be found here and here.

Further info is available on the dedicated Web site.

The Contiki team has just released version 2.1 of the open source Contiki operating system for low-power, wireless, memory-constrained networked embedded devices that typically have as little as a few kilobytes of RAM. The major highlight of this release is a unique energy profiling mechanism that measures where energy is spent, and how much energy is consumed. This is extremely important when optimizing for low-power operation: to know where to optimize, one must first know where energy is spent. Other additions to the 2.1 release are low-power radio protocols that increase system lifetime from days to years, and improved data collection routing protocols.

Hi all,

I’m the newest contributor to WSNBLOG.com, so I thought I’d start out with a shameless plug for my own research. I’m working on integrating environmental sensors into cell phones. We’re doing a platform based on a bluetooth link to a phone, integrating into the battery compartment, with both off the shelf and bleeding edge sensors. We have some CO, NO2 and SO2 data we gathered in Ghana using an off the shelf datalogging solution this spring that we’ll publish shortly, and we have some cool algorithms that we’re about to publish as well.

The bleeding edge sensor is a MEMS particulate mass sensor which measures the change in frequency of a resonating FBAR as PM2.5 particles deposit on it via thermal phoresis. We will have the miniature prototype running this month (a larger prototype already works), and it will also integrate particle discrimination using IR and UV LED based interferometry.

The algorithmic research focuses on super-sampling for higher sensing precision, automatic calibration, and later work will include plume detection and context inference.

Check out the web site if you’re interested, and I’ll give some more details soon!

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~honicky/nsmarts

Texas Instruments has released v1.0.0 of the SimpliciTI network protocol, a proprietary low-power radio frequency (RF) protocol targeting simple, small RF networks (less than 100 nodes). SimpliciTI network protocol (see structure) was designed to ease implementation with minimal MCU resource requirements. It runs out-of-the-box on TI’s MSP430 ultra-low-power MCU and CC110x/CC2500 RF transceivers and is provided as source code under a free license, without royalties. Developers are encouraged to adapt the protocol to their own specific application needs. A new release with power management embedded in the stack is due in Q4 2007.

Hardware? The new TI eZ430-RF2500 platform combines 16-MHz 16-bit MSP430F2274 microcontroller with CC2500 RF transceiver chip on a removable target board. This development tool is designed for low-cost, low-power, and low-speed sensor and control applications. The CC2500’s packet handling support is limited to CRC checking, which is adequate for many applications, as are the 64-byte FIFOs. This radio chip has a range of configuration options, including different operating frequencies in the 2.4-GHz band.

The eZ430-RF2500, claimed the world’s smallest low-power wireless development tool is priced at $49, it includes a USB emulator to program and debug your application in-system and two wireless target boards.

Quoting Philip Levis, who coordinates the WG efforts:
“..Historically, the WG list has been closed only to members, with non-members being able to read the archives online. A few weeks ago, the WG decided that it would be better if most technical discussions occurred in a public forum. We decided that this would be an excellent use of tinyos-devel. The private WG list still exists, but we plan to use it mostly for administrative issues, such as organizing teleconferences and release management.. ”

As they are starting to package up 2.0.2, there would be a few discussions on some proposed changes for the next release, 2.1. According to the recent peak of activity in the tinyos-devel list, currently active developers are planning to include a new version of the Python stack developed by Matt Welsh and his group at Hardvard, which will permit to migrate all PC-side tools to Python.

Among other interesting contributions, there is a new implementation of the serial forwarder for T2 in C++, by Andreas Koepke from TU Berlin, which may also be included. Been more reliable and showing higher throuput, the new code it’s tailored to run on the ARM based NSLU2.

Interested to catch up with more details and contribute? You might be willing to join the list here

If you are using TmoteSky or TelosB wireless motes in your lab, there are now 3 new plug-in sensor boards available from EasySen:

a) The SBT80 Eight Modality Sensor Board: a total of 8 sensor channels makes this the ideal board for sensor fusion tasks. It features 2-D magnetic, 2-D acceleration, temperature, acoustic, IR and light sensors.

b) The Wi-Eye Surveillance/Security Board: This board contains sensitive acoustic, IR motion, and light sensors. Heat signatures can be detected from more than 300 feet away. The board allows for very low sampling rates with “event back dating” capability.

c) The SBT30-EDU Board: a very low cost prototyping board for educational and development purposes. It features a connector for external devices and a prototyping area plus 3 integrated sensors. They offer deep volume discounts on this board.

EasySen is a provider of customized design and consulting services for specialized sensor suites, sensor fusion, navigation algorithms, and swarm systems.

You may visit them here for more info and online ordering.

The ZigBee(TM) Alliance, a global ecosystem of companies creating wireless solutions for use in residential, commercial and industrial applications, today announced North American and European ZigBee Developers’ Conferences and a ZigBee Product Certification Webinar. These seminars provide product developers with deeper insight into the ZigBee product development lifecycle: from design bench to sales shelf.

The ZigBee Product Certification Webinar is an interactive online event scheduled for January 31, 2007 at 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. PST explaining the ZigBee certification process for products, as well as the benefits and resources offered to members of the ZigBee Alliance. The event will be hosted by Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance, and Bill Wood, chair of the ZigBee Alliance Qualification Working Group. For more webinar details or to register, please visit:

http://www.zigbee.org/en/events/index.asp#webinars .

Developers’ Conference: ZigBee Developers’ Conferences are specifically designed to help companies get products to market faster. The Third Annual ZigBee Developers’ Conference for North America will be held in San Jose, California, at the McEnery Convention Center on April 3-5, 2007 in conjunction with the Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley. For registration, conference agenda and hands-on ZigBee certified platform training schedule, please visit:

http://www.zigbee.org/en/events/developersconference_2007.asp .

In response to demand, a ZigBee Developers’ Conference for Europe is scheduled for June 18-20, 2007 in Munich, Germany. A call for papers and registration information for this event will be available in the coming weeks. For more information, please contact: EuZDC@stzen.de .

More information here.