SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

This is a kind of brilliant idea, since current trends of laptops manufactured with accelerometer sensors. And this would be a large peer-to-peer earthquake warning system. Sounds like SETI@home, but for collecting data instead of processing it. From NPR.org:

Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.

“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.

So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.

Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.

No accelerometer sensor but still want to participate? That won’t be any problem since you can purchase a USB sensor for use on your desktop computers. A lot of these, reportedly, are being installed in public schools.

Courtesy: Make

The Cheap Vegetable Gardner wanted more automation than their previous PS2 controller based grow system. This time they set out to design a full featured, compact grow controller that can measure temperature and humidity as well as control a heat lamp, fan, and water pump. An Arduino provides USB connectivity and interfaces the solid state relays and sensors. The assembled project all fits in a box but we are left wondering how much heat the four SSRs generate and will it be a problem?

source: hackaday

This cute little project, shows us how to create a motion activated alarm that plays the mario brothers theme and flashes some lights. he’s using an attiny13a for the brains, and a cool mario mushroom candy tin for the body. you can see it in action after the break.

source: JARV.org

A SMART vibration sensor with wireless communication for recording and analysing train vibration has been developed in the country.

Alka Dubey and Ashish Verma of Sagar University brought this innovation to light, while presenting their paper at the fourth international Wireless Communication Sensor Networks concluded at Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIIT-A) on Monday (Dec 29).

Dubey said that high speed trains are one of the most impressive developments of the recent years having brought a new degree of comfort for travelers. These trains posed serious accidents because of the high level of vibration, which are generated. Therefore to make the train speed smoother, a smart vibration sensor is developed. It is a self sensation device equipped with recording and wireless communication interface.

Source: Merinews

As everyone who’s had a ref make a bad call at their team’s expense knows, NFL refs aren’t perfect. But footballs and gloves with built-in sensors? Those might just make coach’s challenges history.

Dr. Priya Narasimhan of Carnegie Mellon University has developed the football and gloves, loading them up with wireless sensors that can precisely determine whether or not a ball hit the ground before being caught or whether or not someone had control of the ball before fumbling. It could also, using GPS, determine whether or not the ball cross the goal line. But the applications don’t stop there.

Eventually, the same kind of sensors used in the gloves could be adapted to shoes, to measure stride and running patterns, or even shoulder pads, to calculate blocking positions and force.The current version of the glove has 15 touch sensors on the fingers and palm, running to a wireless module on the back of the arm, said Adam Goldhammer of Richboro, Bucks County, a master’s student in electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.

Source: Gizmodo.com

Using the ZigBee wireless protocol, Fourier Systems’ DataNet wireless data loggers offer 4 recording inputs for direct measurement and recording of PT-100 thermocouple (J, K, and T), voltage, current, frequency, and pulse. The devices come with internal temperature sensors, a 4-channel RF logger, operating keypad, LCD display, and a monitoring network. Long range monitoring is possible with multiple alarms, including SMS and e-mail, to any location. Each unit serves as a transmission repeater to neighboring units to form a mesh network of up to 65,000 nodes.

Source: ECN

Carspotting: Part of a mesh network, this sensor node embedded in a San Francisco street can detect when a car parks in the spot beside it. It also monitors passing traffic. See following image credit to Streetline.

This fall, San Francisco will implement the largest mesh network for monitoring parking to date. Around 6,000 wireless sensors from the San Francisco company Streetline will be fixed alongside as many parking spots, monitoring both parking availability and the volume and speed of passing traffic. The city hopes that displaying information from the sensors on Web maps, smart phones, and signs on the street will reduce the traffic and pollution caused by circling cars.

A mesh network differs from a typical wireless network in that there’s no central transmitter: every node can transmit to every other node. Mesh networks have generally been used for environmental monitoring, or to grant wireless devices Internet access.

When sensor networks have been deployed roadside, it’s usually been to monitor traffic, not parking. In urban areas, traffic-monitoring systems have been used for congestion pricing: during business hours in downtown London, for instance, the license plates of cars are photographed, and the drivers are sent a bill. Some parking garages also have signs that tell drivers where the available spaces are, but such systems generally rely on manual car counting, not sensors.

In San Francisco, however, clusters of plastic-encased, networked sensors are embedded in the surface of the street. The main sensor in the cluster, which is commonly used to detect cars, is a magnetic one, says Jim Reich, the vice president of engineering at Streetline. Magnetic sensors detect when a large metal object locally disrupts Earth’s magnetic field. One challenge with magnetic sensors is avoiding false positives. “We rely on the magnetometer the most, but in order to fix errors, we use other types of sensors [that] give you much higher reliability,” says Reich. He won’t elaborate on the supporting sensors, but he says that the Streetline system has a high ninety percent accuracy in recognizing parked cars. (more…)

Avago Technologies announced a new low cost miniature surface mount ambient light photo sensor for controlling display backlighting in a wide range of portable electronic applications. Avago’s APDS-9008, which is designed to approximate the spectral response curve of the human eye, helps to significantly reduce power consumption to extend battery life in mobile phones, PDAs, notebook computers, TVs, video and digital still cameras. Avago is a leading supplier of analog interface components for communications, industrial and consumer applications.

The APDS-9008 is an analog-output ambient light photo sensor that comes in a lead-free miniature chipLED surface mount package. This new sensor from Avago offers a wide voltage range from as low as 1.6 V up to a maximum of 5.5 V and incorporates a spectrally suited photo sensor, which provides excellent responsivity. It targets designers of applications that require the measurement of ambient light to control display backlighting power consumption. Moreover, applications such as mobile phones and PDAs that draw heavy current for backlit LCD displays will benefit from incorporating this surface mount ambient light sensor into their designs.

The APDS-9008 is a pin-to-pin compatible alternative to Avago’s APDS-9005 and provides designers with a miniature low-cost ambient light sensor that can work at a much lower Vcc of 1.6V. (more…)

This is pretty cool, but the name maybe needs a bit of work… just some additional informations about this interesting web service, previously covered in Realtime sensor network awaits your input or output

Pachube (pronounced “patch bay”) is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical “patch bay” (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to “plug-in” to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can “talk” and “respond” to each other.

Source: WSN Blog Link , Original Link

Ahha, no more gang-land activities will taken place since this system installed on your hometown-cities. ShotSpotter is the world leader in gunshot location and detection systems for the public safety and military markets. The company has been delivering patented, state-of-the-art gunshot location and detection solutions for more than a decade.  Every day, officials in more than a dozen cities rely on ShotSpotter systems, with each and every customer a willing reference to our capabilities and results.

A ShotSpotter network includes 12 to 20 sensors per square mile. Roughly the size of a medium pizza, the devices are hidden on rooftops, utility poles, and in other inconspicuous places. Here are the components of a typical unit:

Microphone An internal microphone array gives the sensor 360-degree coverage and makes it possible to determine the direction a sound came from.
GPS Receiver Global positioning satellites give the location of each sensor. GPS also serves as a central clock, making it possible to triangulate an incident’s location based on the speed of sound.
Thermometer Air temperature determines the speed of sound — crucial to calculating a shot’s location. The server at the station checks the Net for other atmospheric conditions that affect sound waves.
Network Connection Each sensor is in constant contact with the server. Some are connected by a telephone line. Others have a digital link managed by a microprocessor.
Memory In sensor units with a processor, if communication is interrupted or bandwidth becomes clogged, the memory stores the sounds until they can be uploaded.

Wired Reviews: Shot Spotter, Ears on the Street, Spotting the Shot

Website: Shotspooter