Digi International has published an article where they shows how wireless sensor networks are being used to monitor fire forests, river flooding and other phenomena which were not previously detectable in real time due to their difficult-to-access nature. Sensor networks in mountains, river banks, and in harsh environments can now be deployed using the Libelium Waspmote platform. Digi sets this sensor device platform as a successful case of the use of the XBee transceivers as Waspmote that allow long range links (up to 12km in the 868MHz band) with the lowest consumption sleep mode (0.7uA). This is also crucial for other situations such as areas hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes where sensor networks need to be completely autonomous and robust.

Read the entire Digi article here.

The Amazon rainforest alone stores an amount of carbon equivalent to a decade of global fossil fuel emissions, and plays a crucial role in the world’s precipitation and oxygen-transfer processes — earning it the nickname, the “lungs of the world.” Because of its sheer size, changes in the forest affect not only the local environment, but global weather, by altering wind and ocean current patterns.

Understanding how those processes work on a small scale was the goal of the recent Brazilian Rainforest Sensor Network project — a joint effort from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Johns Hopkins University, the São Paulo Research Foundation, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, andMicrosoft Research.

It’s part of an effort to help scientists better understand the planet’s delicate and complex systems, and the impact of human activities. Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, says that information technology is playing a key role in that quest. Microsoft is working on several fronts to help scientists understand and share environmental information, and demonstrate the potential of this research.

“With the world’s population expected to hit 9 billion people by 2040, all of us need to better understand our impact on the planet,” Bernard says. “In order to understand, we need to have better information and better ways to visualize that information.”

In 2009, scientists from the groups working on the Amazon project converged in Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic coastal rainforest in the state of São Paulo, southeast Brazil, to develop, build, test and deploy a wireless sensor network for collecting environmental data.

Program Manager Rob Fatland of Microsoft Research’s External Research division was brought onboard the project for his expertise in deploying sensor networks into rugged environments.

More info here.

From NetworkWorld, interesting discussion about ZigBee:

I recently attended an IEEE Communications Society event that focused on ZigBee, a very interesting set of radios and protocols mostly designed for telemetry and control applications. And during the entire presentation, my mind wandered back to a fundamental question – how many radios do we really need in a handset? ZigBee isn’t yet big in the home, but imagine a residential-automation system using ZigBee, handling security, energy management (“smart grid” is a key focus for the ZigBee community), home entertainment, personal communications, etc. etc. Gosh, given such, wouldn’t it be great to have a ZigBee radio in a handset? Will such come to pass?

I doubt it. In fact, let me throw this out: in the not-too-distant future, the only radios in most handsets will be 802.11n Wi-Fi (dual-band) and LTE. That’s it, and that’s really all that’s required.

More info here.

Sensors that smell help save lives everyday. From cars that won’t start because court-ordered breathalyzers smell alcohol in the operator’s blood stream, to bomb-sniffing machines at the airport, to complex medical tests that analyze your breath – we are designing machines that smell to make the world a safer place.

Smell sensors are essential to the future of the Internet of Things. From RFID stickers capable of smelling food through the package and updating the food’s status to the Web, to our next phone being a “smell phone”, engineers are finding innovative ways to help protect our families from being exposed to toxic hazards.

More info here.

The 2nd ACM Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings and Surroundings will be held in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2010, in Zurich, Switzerland – November 2, 2010.

The World is increasingly experiencing a strong need for energy consumption reduction and a need for efficient use of scarce natural resources. Official studies report that buildings account for the largest portion of World’s energy expenditure and have the fastest growth rate. Clearly, energy saving strategies that target energy use in buildings and surroundings can have a major impact worldwide, driving the current energy market toward self-sufficiency and self-sustainability. This calls for effective techniques and methods that enable accurate carbon foot printing, monitoring and control of appliance activity, energy auditing and management in buildings and surroundings and the generation of energy awareness.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) plays a key role in enabling energy-saving systems in buildings and surrounding spaces by providing a reliable, cost-effective and extensible solution that can be placed in existing as well as new structures and be controlled via the Internet. In fact, WSNs allow the monitoring of the energy consumption  in near-real time and, as such, they are an essential tool in the control loop that will be used in future structures for the generation and usage of diverse types of energy.

Following the success of the past edition of the workshop, BuildSys 2010 focuses on the intersection between WSNs and energy in buildings by merging experts in the WSN domain and experts in the Building/Energy community in order to identify innovative solutions which achieve the broad goal of energy-reduction.

CFP and more available here

Important dates

Submission deadline: 30 July 2010
Notification of acceptance: 7 September 2010
Camera Ready Due: 25 September 2010
Workshop date: 2 November 2010

A few weeks ago, People Power introduced a kit it calls SuRF, for Sensor Ultra-Radio Frequency, that helps connect household appliances and gadgets to a wireless network in your house. What that means is that you could monitor your microwave, Playstation and coffee machine in real time, check their levels of energy consumption, and make apps to control how they behave. Ultimately, that could lead to substantial savings of energy and money.

The $150 SuRF is a developer’s kit, which means you can’t simply buy it, plug it into your refrigerator, and start cutting your energy consumption in half: You have to connect it to your gadget or appliance and then build an app to make it work.

SuRF consists of two boards with long-range 900-MHz radios, powered by the Texas Instruments CC430 platform. “Lower frequencies let you penetrate walls and go much further than the standard 2.4-GHz frequency,” says David Moss, People Power’s director of device engineering.

He brings out two pairs of wireless network transmitters and receivers. One pair operates on 2.4 GHz, the frequency used in many wireless devices. The other are SuRF boards running at 900 MHz. We place one of each type in the room, and walk out to the front yard with the other two. The signal from the 2.4-GHz source dies out soon. SuRF is still blinking after almost a hundred feet.

More info here and here.

From RFIDNews:

Izzy’s Ice Cream Café in St. Paul, Minn. is utilizing RFID technology to give customers real-time updates on all the available flavors in its dipping cabinet, according to a Computerworld article.

The store has more than 100 flavors to its name, but only serves 32 in its dipping cabinet at any one time. The dipping cabinets are equipped with readers which capture each of the flavor’s corresponding labels embedded with an RFID tag. Information is captured by the readers 22 times every second and sent to a system which updates Izzy’s Web site, so customers can know what is available before even having to come in the store.

The system also projects colored dots on the store’s wall or a TV behind the counter, to allow customers to easily know what flavors are available.

When an employee places a new flavor in the dipping cabinet they also swap out the RFID tag in front of the tub with the one corresponding to that flavor.

Customers who sign up, can get e-mail updates, and soon text messages, when their favorite flavor is being served. Izzy’s also sends updates to its Facebook page and Twitter account.

To read more click here.

27th May 2010 – National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK

Wireless micro-autonomous systems with their very severe volume constraints present significant challenges to the design of power sources that meet the operational requirements of key application scenarios. State-of-art power sources often fail to meet such requirements and while energy harvesters provide a promising alternative, interfacing them properly remains a major problem. Power management is an active research topic aiming to control power consumption in electronic devices, while providing a reasonably good performance.

This one day event organised by the Sensors & Instrumentation KTN and the Electronics KTN on the 27th May 2010 at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington UK and aims to explore the design opportunities provided by power management concepts and optimisation strategies that are applicable to the scale of micro-autonomous systems. The event will disseminate the results of a recently conducted survey on power management technologies. The programme will feature a panel discussion debating the best practices in design approaches at the system level covering hardware, software implementation and innovative systems design. The event will be an opportunity to meet innovators from the electronics and sensing community as well as developers and users of power management technologies and applications.

For further information visit http://www.tinyurl.com/ktnpmc

The 5th annual IEEE European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context a platform to discuss   techniques, algorithms, architectures, protocols, and user aspects underlying context-aware  smart surroundings and cooperating intelligent objects.

The conference will take place in Passau, Germany, from 14 – 16 November.

We invite the submission of full papers, posters, and demos on subjects related to:
* Distributed smart sensing and context recognition
* Context processing
* Context-aware actuators, interaction methods, and human aspects
* Applications, deployment, test beds and case studies
* Opportunistic information and context processing

The paper submission deadline is June 16 2010.

More information is available here.

Libelium announces a new Bluetooth module for the Waspmote wireless sensor network platform. This module enables wireless sensor networks to be directly linked to portable devices such as smart phones and laptop computers. This capability is particularly useful for medical applications and for industrial diagnostics. Additionally, when combined with the Meshlium multi-protocol router, it supports the deployment of hybrid ZigBee-Bluetooth wireless sensor networks. In order to prevent interferences between both technologies, the new module uses Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) to work just in free channels.
More information here.