HydroWatch – Following the Life Cycle of Water

From Crossbow’s blog:

Researchers at the Berkeley Institute of the Environment have taken the initiative to do what they can to understand and create solutions to help the future of the planet. Specifically, the HydroWatch project is designing a new framework for quantifying the incredibly complex pathways of water. By designing advanced new sensors that can monitor water above, within, and below plant canopies as well as in soils and streams, the team has a prototype system that can readily be replicated to investigate the effects of climate change and urban development on freshwater supply. The data they can gather will help to inform public policy and planning frameworks for California and beyond.

More info here.

Open-ZB is one year old

One year has elapsed since the release of the Open-ZB web site. During this period, the site witnessed over 18000 visits and over 700 downloads, from worldwide reputed universities, RTD institutions and companies. Within this context, several bi-lateral and multi-lateral collaboration initiatives have been triggered, which we believe will leverage even further the quality, completeness and usage of the Open-ZB open-source toolset.

Recent scientific and technological advancements within the ART-WiSe framework have been demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols as federating communication technologies for Wireless Sensor Networks, particularly for applications with stringent QoS requirements, such in Cyber-Physical Systems. Fortunately, our vision on using standard COTS technologies in large-scale embedded computing applications has been and is being recognized by the academic and industrial communities at large.

Dust launches wireless sensor networking research program

Dust Networks announced the Dust Networks Research Innovation program designed to foster continued innovation of WSN applications in the academic and research community.

The Research Innovation program also provides access to the Dust Networks Research support community, which provides a forum for sharing of information, ideas, best practices and practical development and deployment solutions for a broad range of WSN applications, which include energy management, environmental and infrastructure monitoring, patient activity monitoring, hospital asset management and many others.

Build Your Own Smart Drink Coasters

From Sentilla’s Blog:

The idea: let’s build drink coasters that are so smart, they know when a drink has been placed on them and whether it is full or empty. They can notify the bartender when you need a new drink, and even be used to play drinking games.

Read how the Sentilla folks have done it, using a product they call Tmote Mini and Java for the software side. The complete article can be found here.

Must-have gadgets for the discerning geek

Sun SPOTs have just been named a “must-have gadget for the discerning geek” by InfoWorld. This means that all of you who play with Sun SPOTs are “discerning” geeks!

The InfoWorld article can be found here.

INTERNET OF THINGS 2008

International Conference for Industry and Academia
March 26-28, 2008, Zurich (Switzerland)
Organized by ETH Zurich, University St.Gallen, and MIT

The scientific programme is available here.

The conference website is www.internet-of-things-2008.org.

Notes from Sensys'07

This year Sensys’07 has been successfully held Sydney, AU. The conference accepted 1 paper over 6 meaning an acceptance rate of just above 16%. The best paper award was given to “Tracking Mobile Nodes Using RF Doppler Shifts” by Branislav Kusy, Akos Ledeczi, Xenofon Koutsoukos. The paper follows the traditional physical/theoretical approach (a moot point!) of the guys at Vanderbilt University and recently at Stanford University for Kusy.

The best presentation award was given to “CargoNet: A Low-Cost MicroPower Sensor Node Exploiting Quasi-Passive Wakeup for Adaptive Asynchronous Monitoring of Exceptional Events” by Mateusz Malinowski, Matthew Moskwa, Mark Feldmeier, Mathew Laibowitz, Joseph A. Paradiso. This paper has been developed during the Cargonet project at MIT Boston that utilizes micropower tags for supply-chain management and security applications.