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.

With support from SPIDER, the establishment of a National Research and Development centre for Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (WASNs) at the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) in Sri Lanka started in January 2006. The current vision for the WASN centre is to establish itself as a leading research centre for wireless communication and sensor networks in the South Asian region.

The WASN centre is offering a 15-week course, starting in January 2007 in the fourth year of the undergraduate program for Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at UCSC. This course is covering wireless ad-hoc communication and sensor networks with emphasis on hands-on studies.

More info is available on the SPIDER newsletter.

The International Technology Alliance (ITA), led by IBM, consists of top researchers in industry, academia, and government whose goal is to rethink network computing and communications across urban environments.

Z-Wave won the 2006 PC World Award and more recently the Prestigious 2006 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the Wireless Category. The Z-Wave protocol, an obvious contender to ZigBee, provides solutions to home automation applications at low cost. Z-Wave is charaterized by simplicity and there is a SoC solution developed by its originator, the small Danish company Zensys. The number of products is growing among satisfied customer, according to this article from Embedded magazine. Moreover, the technology is backed up by the Z-Wave Alliance.

Professor Hongwei Zhang from the CS Dep at Wayne State University has research positions availables for talented student that would be interested into joining his research group.

Their research focuses on foundational and systems issues in designing dependable services for dynamic and large scale systems (such as wireless sensor networks and the Internet). Examples include application-adaptive messaging, reliable and real-time communication, and scalable dependability for wireless sensor networks.

Presently, there is especial interested in the modeling and algorithmic issues in building dependable sensornet systems. Their work has provided dependable messaging services for several large scale sensor networks (including the one where more than 1,400 sensor nodes were deployed, the largest sensor network ever deployed so far), as a part of their effort in building the foundations and services for dependable sensornets.

Further details here

Prof. Zhang can be contacted at: hzhang (AT) cs (DOT) wayne (DOT) edu

The wireless sensor device looks like a toy and is not much bigger than a person’s hand — yet it heralds a revolution that could save massive amounts of water and help keep the state’s agriculture industry afloat. The device, called a “nictor”, uses wireless sensor devices that have been developed in a laboratory at the University of Melbourne. The lab is part of the National ICT Australia group of research centres.

The wireless technology is at the heart of a system that gets water to the crop and farm on demand, not by a scheduled roster. The system uses water more efficiently than a conventional irrigation system and requires less water to be used. It’s the result of research that has been driven by John Langford, director of the university’s Melbourne Water Research Centre, and a team of specialists from various organisations.

The complete story here.

Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes. Event-driven programming is often considered “hard” because of the need to explicitly manage state-machines. Protothreads significantly reduce the complexity of programming memory constrained systems by making it possible to write event-driven programs in a thread-like style, with a memory overhead of only two bytes per protothread.

Read the Protothreads SenSys 2006 paper here.

Protothreads library is available for download here.

The Embedded WiSeNts Project has released a detailed report that presents an in-depth critical survey of a number of advanced research platforms for wireless sensor networks. Autored by experienced developers on each of the respective solutions, the document reviews some operating systems, hardware and simulators used today.

It’s a worth reading.

You can register and download the report here

I came across an interesting article on the deployment of a wireless sensors network from Intelesense Technologies in Ethiopia to monitor antiretroviral drug therapies for AIDS. The system is expected to replace paper-based handwritten data collection systems currrently used to track the progress of the disease.
Ethiopia with a population of about 70 million faces one of the direst AIDS epidemics in all of Africa with more than 2 million thought to be infected with HIV and with about one million AIDS orphans.
Health-care delivery in Ethiopia seems to face challenges like lack of power, lack of adequate telecommunication systems and widely scattered population. About 80 percent of Ethiopians seem to live outside it’s cities in remote villages and doctors travel from village to village by foot or by cart.

The complete story is available here and here.