Sensor Area Networks (SANs)

[davidbrady]

Hey Ned, Great to hear from you! I need my Arduino pal to help guide me along here!

I'm thinking that the application that might garner the most interest might be remote bus monitoring. I know I sure could use something like this since my bus is now stored 100 miles away. Other's should find this useful if they travel with pets. The age old issue of having a buttoned up RV experience shore power failure w/o a genny auto start, or an unreliable genny auto start is one that many pet owners understand. I seem to recall that the Westhaver Gencon boards (auto genny start) in our LXi's has features that were included specifically to satisfy worried pet owners.

So, remote monitoring and possibly control of the generator might be a nifty feature, along with monitoring of inside temperatures and air conditioner status. I'd like to upload this stuff to the cloud (modern speak for internet) and provide a server for folks to browse their bus state.

All the small bit pieces are there to do this. The big question is what connectivity channel is available and is it economical. A quick google search reveals that the major carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc) aren't interested in the M2M market. M2M is short for machine to machine. Lucky for us there is a major and growing demand for M2M so specialized carriers have stepped forward to fill the gap economically. Long haul truckers are fueling the demand, and the service providers have developed packages for just a few dollars a month that allow a limited number of kilobytes of usage, which fits our needs almost exactly.

I'm awaiting my second shipment from Sparkfun and then we'll get busy!