Engineers at Scotland’s Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) have begun work on the development stage of a £3.3 M project to design a wireless sensor system set to become a standard feature of the next generation of commercial aircraft. The project, which will enable the real-time monitoring of critical components during flight and could make a vital contribution to improved air safety, is jointly funded by the UK Technology Board and some of the aerospace industry’s leading companies.

More info here

The CONET Consortium just released their Research Roadmap (2009 ver) to the public domain. The book contains an introduction to the topic of cooperating objects, state of the art review in the field and a compendium of research gaps and trends. It serves well as an overview of hot research topics to be pursued by their members and the community at large in the near future.

You may download the Rodmap here (6 Mb pdf file).

The second edition of the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project™ is accepting proposals from Today thru February 1, 2010.

This contest seeks to identify and fund (up to 600 k USD) the best innovations using wireless related technology to address critical social issues around the world. Project proposals must demonstrate significant advancement in the field of wireless-related technology applied to social benefit use.

The competition is open to projects from universities and nonprofit organizations based in the United States, despite projects may operate and help people overseas.

The video above shows one of the awardees of the past edition, a  group at the EE Department in UCLA, lead by Prof. Aydogan Ozcan. They have devised a simple wireless microscope system that allows the remote analysis of blood sample images, captured in the field with a mobile phone equipped with inexpensive optics. The images are then transmitted wireless to a center for rapid counting/processing and the result comes back as a text message.

More information available here

Libelium has released their first open source manager system to control embedded Linux devices. It is specially suited for routers which need to control several wireless interfaces and radio technologies, more commonly named as multiprotocol routers (e.g. Meshlium).

The software brings a special ZigBee sniffer plugin to capture data frames. There is also a bunch of documents in the Development section in order to help developers to add their own plugins and functionalities.

You can download it from the Libelium’s website and try it in any Linux system (there is also a demo online to try directly from the web).

More info at: Meshlium Manager System 2.0.

Researcher Carlo Alberto Boano, formerly at SICS, received the Bengt Asker Award for his thesis: Application Support Design for Wireless Sensor Networks (Zip 10 MB).

The award is given by The Swedish National Real-Time Association for the best Swedish master or final year thesis in the field of real-time and embedded systems.

The research work was conducted within the Center for Networked Systems. The author was jointly supervised by Pablo Suarez (Saab) and Thiemo Voigt (SICS).

Congratulations from the WSNBlog team!

More details here and there

ACM SenSys, the flagship conference in Sensor Networks, will he held in Berkeley, California on November 4-6 2009 and the program is now available. Among the novelties: the Keynote Address links to Google Research and their PowerMeter Project. Inspiring?

Participants to the CONET SENIOT Summer School held in Bertinoro, Italy, this summer had the opportunity to attend an interesting hands-on session with basic exercises with the Contiki Operating System for WSN. Material from the course is available online, you could download the slides from the presentation and session notes. The material is self consistent so you could try it out too!

Contiki, developed mostly at SICS since 2003, has reached a level of stability that is interesting to explore further and it also has a growing community of users. Earlier this month, two new ports were made avaialbe: Crosbow MicaZ and Sensinode, besides other platforms already supported.

Everything Contiki available here

Contiki 2.3 is now available. It brings a new IPv6 routing layer, IPv6/6lowpan for the Tmote Sky platform, the Cooja TimeLine, a set of new shell commands, improvements to the LPP and X-MAC power-saving radio protocols, a new port to the MSB430 platform, and a Twitter client.

The release also includes an updated version of Instant Contiki, the Contiki development environment.

Check their the web site for downloads

IBM’s Zürich Research Laboratory is working in the Mote Runner runtime and development platform for heterogeneous wireless networks. It’s meant to overcome some of the challenge of programming a WSN application. Although currently, it runs exclusively on Crossbow Iris motes, the runtime environment creates a virtual machine which shields applications from hardware heterogeneity, and is supposed to support a diversity of platforms. Developers are working to have the platform available in a near future.

This article on EE Times has the story. You would also visit the project website for a deailed look.

Digging a bit deeper in the topic we found some insights on the RF Energy Harvesting technology from Powercast that won a Gold-level “Best of Sensors Expo” Award at the 2009 Sensors Expo, also in the previous post. A compilation of awards is available in this article of Sensor Magazine.

At the Darnell nanoPower Forum on May 18th, Powercast and CAP-XX presented this battery-free wireless power module (left) for wireless sensors.  The module uses the Powercast P2100 Powerharvester receiver, a CAP-XX supercapacitor, and the TI eZ430-RF2500 wireless board and thus harvest RF from the environment to power the TI module running SimpliciTI.

The Slides from that presentation can be found here