Sensor Area Networks (SANs)

[nedb]

(06-01-2013 11:09)davidmbrady Wrote:  It's folks sitting in their garages tinkering and wiring their houses and motorhomes that bootstraps this stuff, then suddenly, one day, we look around and say, "gosh, how did this come about, who would've thought, there's no economic model that would have supported this...". Ha! LOL

Exactly what Gosling reported. The big problem with ubiquitous internet was he could find nothing on the market to serve as his information appliance. The test was "Would a doctor carry it around and use it?" The solution, he found, is "hammer technology"--you find something that has a feature you want, and you extract it. With a hammer. Clean it up and use it in your own design. He was unstoppable. He developed Java to run this device. Talk about 'out of the box'

Whoa Digi! Comin' on strong!! They approached the vehicle connectivity problem with a hammer, that much is clear. Their gateway is crazy connected--everything a coach could possibly have, from a serial port to J1939 to WiFi, and everything a WAN could possibly offer from WiFi to cellular to satellite. A 7" dipole for the XBee!? This is the Swiss Army Knife of gateways. The RS232 could be adapted to ethernet or USB... A lot of this is available anyway, if you get a router and switch to connect cellular, satellite, wifi, to computers, but when they add the vehicle data bus connection to it, it becomes a completed puzzle for vehicles with that data bus. The price isn't bad for a solution in a vehicle with those connectivity options. This kind of device could turn a lot of vehicles into rolling/reporting sensor arrays--a refit with this tech would make many J1939 vehicles very desireable on the used coach market.

--Ned