Sensor Area Networks (SANs)

[davidbrady]

The development in this area is unbelievable Pete. Single board and single chip computers are defining a new industry: ubiquitous computing. It's here, it's now, and it's cheap. Just recently I stumbled across the Phidget lineup; we've already spoken about Arduino, Beaglebone, and Raspberry. I'm a kid in a candy store!

It's hard to argue with the popularity of Arduino and rPi. This alone makes it difficult to leave these platforms out of any WaGu design. The connectivity of these devices has also exploded with the development of radio transmitters and networking protocols. Today I ordered two Arduino UNO's and three XBEE S2 ZigBee Wireless Shields. This is all that's needed to build a mesh of connected Arduinos.

What I'd like to be able to do is grab a node (Arduino with XBEE), place it near the trouble area, wire up and connect a sensor, power on with maybe a battery pack. The node will then automatically join the wireless mesh network and establish a route back to my laptop via an XBEE ZigBee router. From the laptop I'll configure gauges to display sensor data. Unbelievable! The past few years has made all this possible. Everything is available, off the shelf, and cheap.

So, first thing that I plan to do is set up a 2 node mesh: one edge device and one router, both XBEE ZigBee enabled. Parts are on the way!