We have been working heads down for the past few months on a new EC FP7 project called SENSEI. The goal of SENSEI is to provide the real-time sensor and actuator dimension of next generation network and service infrastructures. Or as the project website puts it:

In order to realise the vision of Ambient Intelligence in a future network and service environment, heterogeneous wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have to be integrated into a common framework of global scale and made available to services and applications via universal service interfaces. SENSEI creates an open, business driven architecture that fundamentally addresses the scalability problems for a large number of globally distributed WS&A devices. It provides necessary network and information management services to enable reliable and accurate context information retrieval and interaction with the physical environment. By adding mechanisms for accounting, security, privacy and trust it enables an open and secure market space for context-awareness and real world interaction.

The tangible outputs of the SENSEI project include:

1) plug and play architecture / protocol
2) open service interface
3) efficient WS&AN island solutions (targeting 5nJ/bit)
4) pan European test platform

Our focus has been on supporting the scenario development and hopefully over the next month or two I will post some the scenarios that we have been finding most interesting. The themes we have been focusing on include Smart City, Healthcare and Transport.

The project fits under Future Internet - ICT Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures

Details of the Bop Creative Workplace conference are now available on the bop website. A pdf of the conference programme can be accessed directly. If you are interested in coming along contact myself.

Friday 30th November 2007
Central Saint Martins Innovation
University of the Arts London, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP

Spent last week at Clima2007 conference in Helskini. A podcast (with slides) of the presentation is available on the foresight podcast stream. Photos on Flickr

Crossbow Technology announces Imote2 .Builder for Microsofts .NET Micro Framework - looks like a MS version of the sunspot kit....

Spoke at ICT Call 2 Information Day - Hotel Carrefour de l'Europe 110, Rue Marché aux Herbes 1000 Brussels, Presentations have been uploaded to the agenda webpage.

Video of DW presentation at IET Wireless Sensor Networks Conference

The Bop project website has been updated to include more of a public overview of what we are upto. If you have any queries about the project then please get in touch. We are past half way so it should be all downhill from here...

The second public workshop of the DTI project Arup are leading. Drop me a line if you want to attend...

Starting to think about how to view the sensor network data at a macro level. This sample (one week) shows 20 nodes day by day. Temperature on the y axis (and colour), time on x, alpha level showing amount of light.

sample data file from crossbow network.

This is a fully funded three year PhD studentship in collaboration with ARUP. The overall aim of the project is to explore ways in which navigation services can be personalised and made more context-aware. This studentship will provide a very exciting opportunity for a dedicated individual to advance their knowledge and skills in this cutting edge area.

This project will address several questions related to the interplay of technology and real world in creating personalised services, and the nature and usability of technology and the interaction mechanisms used. The balance that has to be achieved between ambience and ubiquity and intrusiveness will also be an important issue to consider. In this way, the project will direct future research in two ways: first, by developing better and more user-friendly navigational models and second, by directing design of buildings and urban environments to make them interactive and accessible.

The Department of Geomatic Engineering at University College London has many leading researchers working in the areas of global positioning systems, geospatial interoperability and mobile location based services. The research will be supervised by Dr Pragya Agarwal at UCL and the student will join the GIS Research Group. The Department of Geomatic Engineering also runs a highly successful Masters in Geographic Information Science and the successful candidate will also have the opportunity to attend relevant modules on this course. The studentship is part funded by ARUP, a global design business and consulting firm, and the student will also have the opportunity to work closely with researchers in ubiquitous computing at ARUP as part of this project.

Candidates will be British nationals with a good first degree, and preferably a Masters degree, in geoinformatics, geography, computer science or related fields. The project will require programming skills for development of interactive systems and interfaces, some prior knowledge of GIS and also relevant interest and/or experience in designing and carrying out human subject experiments, whether in the field or a lab.

Applications should be sent in form of detailed CV along with names/addresses of two referees to Dr Pragya Agarwal at pagarwal[at]ge.ucl.ac.uk. Informal queries regarding the studentship can also be addressed to Dr P Agarwal. Closing Date: 15 January 2007.

just presented Bop to John Prescott - when i spoke about the reasons why we were doing it the analogy he made was to do with military strategy in the American civil war - apparantly the red coats lost a few battles due to the heat and their inability to take off their red coats which hampered their performance due to effect of heat....
anyway, he thought it was a great project and he wanted a couple of motes for his own home.

Time lapse with alpha blending was showing who was looking at what in the demo session...

Attended UbiComp 2006 at Newport Beach, CA. 425 people from 22 countries. 2 days of papers and posters.

Opening keynote by Bruce Sterling who introduced his concept of a SPIME, an object in space and time. He proposed that Ubicomp offers a prime opportunity for delivering sustainability - at its heart it is about understanding the context of stuff in the world around us - we can monitor the environment it is in and how it is used. We can create a system of bits that encapsulate physical atoms of stuff. He presented a diagram showing the lifecycle of SPIMES:

Concepts and designs - google sketchup
Identifying - Unique id - RuBee, rfid, folksonomy
Fabricated - zcorp, MDP realizer
Tracked - Aeroscout
Searched - google, wikiproducts
Recycled - ebay
Data mining - Metadata - everyware, alexa internet archive

The closing keynote by Brenda Laurel was titled Designed Animism. With reference to Aristotle, poetics, narrative, theatre, causality and experience she described the potential of ubicomp to create novel interactive forms. When these new forms are created how will we understand them in terms of structure, causality, narrative and experience. I was reminded suring her talk that mathematics is representing what has been observed in the natural world.

2 tracks of paper. Lots of work being reported on using gsm cells to try and track the location / movement of people *a cheap, lower power consumption alternative to gps*
Eg intel tool at http://www.placelab.org/ see also http://www.placelab.com/ or http://pols.sourceforge.net/

Only downside? The Pigeon blog was unfortunately cancelled because the birds were tired. http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/

From presentations:
eBlocks http://www.cs.ucr.edu/eblocks - Extending available electonics building blocks to make it even easier to hack together simple sensor / switch systems. Have simulator system to build systems using drag and drop given a predefined set of components. Simulator can optimise design (ie changing logic based on what physical components are available - 3 logic gate using 2 2 input logic gates - or removing signal inverters by changing logic gate). Can also optimise based on cost of physical eBlocks. Optimisation works on rules based system developed by expert user. Uses simulated annealing to optimise heuristics. Fixed use blocks and programmable blocks available.
Great presentation from Haiyan Zhang on her Masters Thesis Project from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She has created a portable / personal games controller by attaching motion sensors to a large pair of crocodile clips which can in turn be attached to anything to turn it into a games controller. More at http://www.failedrobot.com/thesis/
WISP - Joshua Smith (Intel Research) - battery free wireless sensing platform - augments RFID so that in addition to being able to tell what is there you can also check its state - temp, vibration, shock, tampering etc. Work came out of the activity recognition project ARP. Really cool 3 axis accel demo video - since gravity is always an effect on an accelerometer then the axis accel acts as a tilt sensor. Great quote from tesla:

At this Colorado "Experimental Station" Tesla had some early success in wireless power transmission. One photograph shows that "a small incandescent lamp was lighted by means of a resonant circuit grounded on one end, all the energy being drawn through the earth [from a nearby transmitter]." In 1907 he even went as far as to make this statement: "... to make the little filament glow, the entire surface of the planet, two hundred million square miles, must be strongly electrified. This calls for peculiar electrical activities, hundreds of times greater than those involved in the lighting of an arc lamp through the human body [a far more spectacular demonstration]. What impresses him most, however, is the knowledge that the little lamp will spring into the same brilliancy anywhere on the globe, there being no appreciable diminution of the effect with the increase of distance from the transmitter."

Links:
Product on the market for measuring energy use in a home: http://www.diykyoto.com/ also see product on offer in NZ at http://www.centameter.co.nz/save-power-new-zealand/centameter-product-info.php
http://www.createascape.org.uk - a tool for creating topographies that you can use to create zones of reference in gps / wifi apps - presented at ubicomp2004
http://www.wigle.net - the database of wifi access points
http://hci.stanford.edu/dtools/ d.tools visual authoring environment using eclipse - includes experimental code to program arduino boards: http://hci.stanford.edu/dtools/arduino.html
http://www.gumstix.com/products.html - gumstix hardware see also community page at: http://www.gumstix.org/
http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/ from yahoo and flickr geo code your photos - unfortunately on for US and nokia phones…
http://www.particle-computer.net/ and http://particle.teco.edu/devices/index.html from Uni Karlsruhe
Look up gigaprint project http://hci.stanford.edu/gigaprints/ - Paper and digital toolkit available - Mission - The Interactive Gigapixel Prints (GIGAprints) project is an experiment in the future of collaborative workspaces, where printed visualizations are augmented with projectors and mobile devices. We are currently designing, building, and testing the interactions and visualizations that best suit these large paper surfaces.

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.

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.

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.

Just registered for this IMI event at RIBA in October. Speakers include Usman Haque.

"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.

A useful streamed video introducing the Crossbow WSN. Requires registering your details with Crossbow but useful to get an overview of how to set-up a WSN at a high level using their hardware / software.

Have sent off 19 MTS300 and MTS310 back to Crossbow for rewiring (2-3 week turn around). Have installed Moteworks v2 rel B. So for time being focusing on application of MTS400 (3 off) and the A/D sensor boards....

Animated gif showing some time stamps of ad hoc routing over the duration of a 2 day trial - note changes in routing patterns - probably due to changes in battery strength and physical changes in space (people, obstructions etc).

This is a screenshot of a 24 hour cycle of 20 motes measuring temp, light, battery, mic, accel and mag. Motes are micaz, sensor boards are MTS300 and 310's. Gateway is an MIB510 connected via serial to USB converter. Data being captured into Postgres db on sony laptop. Code on gateway is XMeshBase as shipped with moteworks 2.0. Code on motes is xmts310 from xmesh folder, again shipped with moteworks 2.0 - the only change was my addition of the following to hard code into the application a timer interval of 30 seconds:
(in static void initialise after timer_rate has been set, inserted at line 169)

timer_rate = 1024 * 30;

The 20 node network gave some interesting trends but weird results. Not sure why there is so much fluctuation in temperature and seems a little too periodic.... lodged a request with the support desk...

Finally got all 20 nodes up and running. 1 gateway and 19 nodes with either MTS300 or MTS310 sensor boards. Had it running overnight - moteview crashed a couple of times will need to try and figure out why. Need to go and review data to see how valid it looks. nice feeling to see all 20 motes networking in an adhoc manner.... :-)

1 gateway and 4 sensor motes running. Having trouble deciphering code to get all sensors working. Have tried to use the XMesh samples as my base. Used the tutorial file (containing the temp only code) and expand it to include the other stuff. All the examples seem to be slightly different implementations though so figuring out what is and what is not required has been tough. Had some fun at one point trying to figure out that the x in AccelX had to be capitalised.....

Ended up reverting back to the MTS300 sensor board sample files and using those with XMesh - there is also some other stuff going on in there (performance assessment) - but have hard coded the timer rate since i could not figure out how to define APP_RATE (i think you do it via the header file ***.h but could not get it working - logged a call to the crossbow help desk)

code finally up and running. have chosen a 30 sec interval for timer firing. interested in the implications for battery life - btw will need to look at low power stuff (is it possible on micaz?) otherwise batteries only last a few days....

next step - 20 nodes and get sampling over a couple of days.....

Making Ubicomp Approachable - workshop at UbiComp 2006. Sounds like an interesting workshop.... Topics include:
* Specific applications and scenarios for early adoption of augmented objects
* Physical embodiment vs. external augmentation.
* Functional vs. thought provoking/playful augmentation.
* Augmenting accessories vs. tools.
* Augmentation related or unrelated to the original function of the object
* Everyday vs. special purpose interaction.
* Original and augmented affordances, and their perception.
* Cognitive barriers to object augmentation.
* Trust issues related to augmented objects.
* Social acceptability and consumer acceptance.

took delivery of 20 motes, a mix of 20 sensor boards, internet gateway and the new moteview software. Started by following the user guide and the tutorials and got simple temp readings out. When i started to try doing my own thing I started to struggle - here are a few reminders for me:

you cannot use the internet gateway with xlisten or xserve from the command line (at least i couldn't figure out or find the syntax to use....) so dig out the serial gateway....
most laptops no longer have serial ports so i am using a USB Serial converter - this means the port(in Cygwin terms) is not Com4 (as displayed in port settings) but /dev/ttyS3 not quite sure why or what the logic is i just found reference to this address somewhere and tried it....
the IP of my device on the intranet is 10.3.0.32

next step is to look at programming all sensors so that i get a stream of all sensor data not just temp.

Intelligent Sensing Programme
Intelligent Sensing Programme Meeting
Venue: Riverside Room, IEE (IET), Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL
To see meeting handouts and delegate list contact Duncan Wilson x52794

Continue reading "Intelligent Sensing Programme Meeting" »

Sun SPOT should be rolled out in May - looking forward to getting my hands on these. Here is an intro for information:

Based on a 32 bit ARM CPU and an 11 channel 2.4GHz radio, Sun SPOT radically simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications. The platform enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication, and use familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as NetBeans to write code.

The Sun SPOT system features the "Squawk VM," a small J2ME virtual machine (VM) written almost entirely in Java. It provides the ability to run wireless transducer applications "on the metal," (directly on the CPU without any underlying OS), saving overhead and improving performance. End users also gain the flexibility to experiment with different implementations of low-level services, such as networking protocols, which are typically buried inside an OS. A set of Java libraries under development will provide access to the sensors, the I/O pins on the sensor application board, and the integrated on-board radio. By running multiple applications on the one virtual machine, and by using a more compact representation of class files, the Squawk VM makes better use of the small memory space available on SPOT devices.

Howstuffworks "How Motes Work" - came across this great intro again...

Discovery Channel Video - on the use of motes for monitoring vineyard growing conditions - had seen the articles about this but good to see a video of the environment and the packaging they are using.

WSN Update - News and Information About Zigbee & Wireless Mesh Sensor Networks a handy blog to review what is going on in the world of WSN - has a US focus.

Paper in IEEE Computer and course info for
CSE 466: Software for Embedded Systems (Wi'06) a great demo of ad hoc networks and emergent behaviour. Each mote in the network sings a bird song. If another mote near by is also singing the same song it reinforces that tune. If they all sing the same then someone starts a new one. If no one nearby is singing the same then they try a new one. This way an emergent flocking starts - nice...

follow up with Bruce Hemingway to request a way to replicate demo.

MoteWorks Wireless Sensor Network Platform has been launched by Crossbow - this should mean out the box configuration of wireless sensor networks (given the apps that ship with it and those that can be used as plugins...) Watch this space... will report more when I have installed and played with it.

One to consider if you don't want the bundled apps that come with crossbow networks.

Crossbow - we are using this product at Arup - the Mica2, Mica2 dot and more recently the Micaz. Gateways include the MIB510 (with USB adapter) and the MIB600 ethernet gateway. Sensor boards include the MTS300 and 310's, the MTS420 and the MDA500. We also have the Moteworks software.

Whilst not strictly WSN technology (but you can get zigbee and bluetooth add ons) we are also using Arduino boards to prototype sensor and actuator interfaces.

Also of interest are SunSpots when they become available.

Others such as Urban Tapestries project are also using MoteIV as an alternative platform.

Reports
The DTI Global Watch Mission to US in late 2005 - pdf report