Sensor Area Networks (SANs)

[davidbrady]

Folks,

For the time being I'm going to set configuring WaGu aside so I can get back to our Sensor Area Network.

I'd like your opinion on a few things.

First, I think scattering arduinos throughout the bus may not be the best solution. Too many arduinos creates too many points of failure. Plus I'm not convinced the arduino with it's associated sensor hardware is up to the commercial/industrial environments our bus SAN requires. Also, the arduino doesn't seem to have the computing power required forcing us to eventually hang them off a Rasberry Pi or some other full purpose high-power computing environment.

To solve some of these issues I started to look around at what the robotics world and the automated factory world is using.

I stumbled across an interesting architecture pioneered by a gentleman named Saul Greenberg from the University of Calgary, Wiki.

His architecture may suit our needs better. Basically he takes a bunch of sensors, aggregates them, and connects them to a computing platform via USB. The computing platform can be any type of machine running a host of real operating systems. It can even be a Rasberry Pi. The rPi can be located anywhere and is powerful enough to communicate via the full TCP/IP stack with any other host, local or remote. This means ostensibly you could control your bus with your iPad (over iOS) from your homebase living room sofa, many miles away.

The idea would be a set of sensors implemented using Phidgets connected to a rPi communicating wirelessly to a GUI somewhere (iPhone, iPad, Android, Laptop, Dashtop).

Check out these links: Phidgets, Robotshop, DSP Robotics, Linux Support.