Sensor Blog

Crossbow Technology taken over

arctanck — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:28:44 +0000

The acquisition price of $18 million in cash by MEMSIC is not bad. For Crossbow is at least a success story when compared to some wireless motes companies, particularly those university spawned ones, that hoped to catch the WSN frenzy but folded along the way. Whether this is the exit strategy Crossbow had initially hoped [...]

Saving energy? We need everyone to be doing that!

arctanck — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:50:58 +0000

Energy seems to be one of the most talked about issue in town recently. I think I might as well have a bit of a rant myself here too. I thought environmental issues are getting people to rethink about energy consumption and all. Wireless sensor motes are leading on that front too to a certain extent, [...]

Smart meters

arctanck — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:27:41 +0000

Yes, 26 million electricity and 22 million gas meters to be fitted at a cost of £7bn in the UK, according to plans unveiled by the government. It is apparently going to mean huge savings for energy firms. But only 2-3% savings for average consumers in terms of energy use. Yet households are required to [...]

Energy awareness, by human?

arctanck — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:33:18 +0000

Climate change and energy shortage, potentially, are demanding people to think twice now when they want to switch on their heating or air-conditioning. Rightly so, human has been too wasteful for too long. Gas guzzling vehicles for style, for recognition. Electronic equipments switched on all day long for no good reasons. My company has just [...]

Battery life for long term deployment

arctanck — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:55:38 +0000

As far as I am aware, off-the-shelf batteries are not designed for long lifetime use, in the order of years. Yet they are being used for long term deployment in WSN. I’ve seen theoretical projections of how long low power wireless motes can last. But there still seems to be an unknown quantity on the [...]

More standardisation for WSN

arctanck — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:17:51 +0000

More standardisation activities, this time to set sensor net standard for process control. Having a big say on how wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in a practical way at the moment, several industries from the automation and control sectors are trying to muscle in their own standards for WSNs. Notably the 30,000-member ISA [...]

New technology and hype

arctanck — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:52:18 +0000

It wasn’t that long ago when 3G network was touted to give mobile users broadband experience on the move. Till today, even though I have 3G capabled mobile phone, I still am not experiencing the “web surfing” experience I enjoy 7-8 years ago using my desktop machine. Whereas the speed of fixed line broadband has [...]

SunSPOTs available in the EU

arctanck — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:49:15 +0000

Having not been keeping in touch with news about WSN for 3 weeks while I was on holiday, I’m notified by my colleague today that SunSPOTs are now finally available in the EU area. But checking on their website myself, it seems that it costs much more to get a Sun SPOT development kit in [...]

How ready is ZigBee?

arctanck — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:00:06 +0000

ZigBee modules are readily available nowadays. Assuming that they can all live up to their expectations, providing the network stack that allows wirelss sensor motes to be easily organised into a network fit for deployment, we will be seeing a host of software applications to be developed for wireless sensor networks this year. My concerns [...]

Open source ZigBee implementation

arctanck — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:21:04 +0000

open-ZB is an open source implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols. Apparently the website has been around for over a year, but not sure how long the implementation has been made available. It doesn’t seem like there’s a sizeable community using it, so if you are thinking of using the code, don’t expect to receive [...]