Experiments with a Solar-powered Sun SPOT
Monday, March 2nd, 2009Many WSN deployments require the devices to run for long periods (months) using a combination of duty cycling and renewable energy sources (e.g., solar panels). This technical report is the first comprehensive study of end-to-end data collection from a solar-powered Sun SPOT over a period of multiple weeks.
We ran our experiment for nearly a month and collected sensor data into a mySQL database for later analysis and visualization. This experiment helped us uncover and fix several issues that caused disruptions in data collection — the occasional inability of the device to enter deep sleep, the resulting clock reset due to premature battery exhaustion, and loss of connectivity to the database after long periods of inactivity. The report offers important lessons in the design of a sensor data collection framework and lists both recommended best practices as well as potential pitfalls to avoid.
The report by Vipul Gupta is available here and some comments are on his blog here.



