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August 31, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
A battery less sensor node that can be used in star configuration to create mesh networks of sensors... http://www.enocean.com/indexenc6.html Main application seems to have been wireless light switches to date.
August 27, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Staying in Hotel Skt Petri tonight. Nice website but just wanted to find a picture of the place... also led me to find http://www.designhotels.com/ which looks handy for trying to find nice hotels for those city stop overs...
August 23, 2006 by Duncan | permalink | Comments (1)
Set-up another 19 node network of Micaz motes with 6 mts310 sensor boards and 13 mts300 sensor boards. Running mts310CB code in low power mode. I initially sat all the motes together (image above) to see how close the various sensor readings were, a crude callibration test. The graph below shows that for the first 12 hour + period there was quite a variation on for example the temperature sensor - a variation of 1.5 degree C - more than i was expecting. I will log a call with xbow help desk.
The other reason for the experiement was to see how long the batteries last in low power mode... will post the results when I have them.
August 15, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Just registered for UbiComp2006. Hoping to take the time out to pull together some writing on Ubiquitous Computing for Arup as part of our Drivers of Change. Also will be visiting the LA office to speak about wireless sensor networks and the DTI work.
August 11, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Just registered for this IMI event at RIBA in October. Speakers include Usman Haque.
August 09, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Would be nice to use this processing library to represent temperature in an environment - *how fast the fire is burning*.
August 09, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Have had a frustrating day with this accelerometer - cannot figure out the code calculating the actual acceleration in Arduino - see forum posting.
August 09, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
A great example of how people are using Arduino as an input conduit to design product.... uses a home made pressure sensor (conductive wire grids separated by foam) around a punch bag as the input device, the ouptut is a 3D model of the object to be made. Great video, love the soundtrack.
August 09, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Just back from 2 days with Artificialtourism getting some hands on experience with Arduino. After a morning of intros to Arduino, basic does and don'ts and looking at sensors available we got onto building some prototypes. First up was using a tri colour LED (see Farnell) with a simple cross fade app (from examples in Arduino).
This was then extended to add a serial read from a processing app that defined the RGB value to be used for the LED. The processing app uses an image of a colour wheel and the mousePressed event to get the pixel RGB value and then writes that to the appropriate serial port. Arduino is watching the same port and when it receives data it buffers the RGB values reading them separately into a function that sets the RGB level of the LED using PWM input to the Arduino circuit.
The other *nice* sensor we used was the parallax ultra-sounder...
August 03, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
"Perpetuum’s vibration energy-harvesting microgenerator is an enabling technology that makes wireless, battery-free sensors a reality." Forwarded by a colleague at Arup - Paul Fuller - good to see that a UK product is pitching for the holy grail of energy harvester for wireless sensor networks.
August 02, 2006 by Duncan | permalink
Came across this nice image of toughened glass viewed through polarised glasses on wikipedia under their polarisation entry. I had been looking up info on Anisotropy for an image analysis project I am doing at Arup. Have been implementing some basic algorithms in processing using co-occurance matrices and simple thresholding functions... might provide a low cost solution. Also getting a demo of image pro plus as a completely alternative route.
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