SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

This is an interesting blog post, mostly because the XBee Pro is rated at about 1.6 km line of sight. However this guy is claiming to get about 150m (~150 yards) before data gets corrupted….

So i have a side project that i’m working on, a wireless OBD-II scanner.  It’s pretty interesting and I have some guidence from a professor at WPI.  The wireless unit I chose to work with is the XBee PRO.  This thing is solid.  The development kit ($179) came with everything I needed to get started and get proof of concept.  I was transmitting wireless data within minutes of setting up the system.  The chip is extremely small, too, so it has a variety of applications.

Source: Zigbee News by Freaklabs

The Regional Transport Authority of Hyderabad, India, has announced plans to monitor its driving test tracks with an RFID-enabled system designed to automate testing for driver licenses.

The new system will be tested in a pilot program at one of the RTA’s three test tracks. The Nagole track will be equipped with a set of RFID readers buried 15 inches beneath the road surface. Applicants for licenses will drive vehicles outfitted with antennas, and the system will track variations in movement, speed limit and wrong turns within parameters preset by the RTA. Test scores, and the prospective driver’s ability, will be judged in a graph format.

The system takes human judgment out of the test administering, after accusations had been made that driving school agents and motor vehicle inspectors were manipulating test results. As additional insurance, thumb impressions would be recorded on the driving license to avoid manipulations

“No discretion is given to a motor vehicle inspector or others,” transport commissioner Raymond Peter said. “Once we see how it works, we will computerize the rest of the tracks. The system will be in place after the monsoon.”

Source: RFID News

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…)

For the last few years, we’ve witnessed a great expansion of remote control devices in our day-to-day life. Five years ago, infrared (IR) remotes for the television were the only such devices in our homes. Now I quickly run out of fingers as I count the devices and appliances I can control remotely in my house. This number will only increase as more devices are controlled or monitored from a distance.

To interact with all these remotely controlled devices, we’ll need to put them under a single standardized control interface that can interconnect into a network, specifically a HAN or home-area network. One of the most promising HAN protocols is ZigBee, a software layer based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. This article will introduce you to ZigBee—how it works and how it may be more appropriate than simply accumulating more remotes.

Why so many remotes? Right now, the more remotely controlled devices we install in our homes, the more remotes we accumulate. Devices such as TVs, garage door openers, and light and fan controls predominantly support one-way, point-to-point control. They’re not interchangeable and they don’t support more than one device. Because most remotely controlled devices are proprietary and not standardized among manufacturers, even those remotes used for the same function (like turning on and off lights) are not interchangeable with similar remotes from different manufacturers. In other words, you’ll have as many separate remote control units as you have devices to control.

Some modern IR remotes enable you to control multiple devices by “learning” transmitting codes. But because the range for IR control is limited by line of sight, they’re used predominantly for home entertainment control.

A HAN can solve both problems because it doesn’t need line-of-sight communication and because a single remote (or other type of control unit) can command many devices.

Source: Embedded.com

Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), which manages the statewide SunPass system, has selected TransCore’s eGo Plus RFID sticker for use on the state’s 460 miles of toll road. The paper-thin, batteryless tags will be sold as the SunPass “Mini” and be available this summer.

The eGo Plus sticker tag is a 915 MHz programmable, beam-powered, windshield-mounted tag packaged as a flexible sticker. Each eGo Plus sticker tag comes equipped with a factory-programmed unique tag identification number to prevent the tag from being duplicated. The eGo Plus technology is also being used by Houston’s Harris County Toll Road Authority, the Texas Department of Transportation, and the Washington Department of Transportation.

The FTE’s initial order with TransCore is for 1.5 million of the tags, which will join the more than three million hardcase SunPass tags currently in use on the state’s roads.

Source: RFID News

The Mini Socket iWiFi embedded serial-to-WiFi module quickly connects embedded devices running machine-to-machine (M2M) applications to 802.11b/g wireless LANs with minimal programming. Employing the company’s iChipSec CO2128 Internet Protocol communication controller chip, the module includes a full suite of Internet protocols and applications, the latest wireless and SSL encryption algorithms, and serves as a firewall.

Source: EEPN

RFID producer Intelleflex Corp. has announced a joint solution with Minds Inc., a information systems provider for the road construction and agriculture industries, to create a system that would automate tracking of crop harvesting.

The solution combines GPS, RFID and wireless communications technologies to provide real-time visibility into the time-sensitive operations of field harvesting. Using this solution, growers and harvesters can track the exact location, timing and efficiency of harvesters, as well as the arrival, loading and departure time of crop transport vehicles.

“In the crunch of harvest time, people are focused on the task at hand (i.e. the harvesting of crops), and not the tracking, recording and communications of operational data. As a result, there is often a lack of the information required to ensure the most efficient operation,” said Pierre Vidaillac, president of Minds Inc.

In the new system, GPS units and RFID readers are mounted on harvesters to track their whereabouts in the field as well as the arrival, loading and departure times of transport vehicles. The information is then transmitted wirelessly for immediate access over the web and mobile phones.

Intelleflex and Minds Inc. have previously collaborated on a similar system which tracking hot mix asphalt for the road construction industry.

Source: RFID News

A research group in Europe has taken a major step towards the goal of developing printable electronics that can be used for creating RFID tags. Researchers in the EU-funded CONTACT project have demonstrated that with suitable inks and printers, organic liquid crystal displays and other optical electronic devices can be printed out precisely.

The project researchers hope to follow this proof-of-principle by developing a gravure printing press, called Labratester 2. The press will be able to print hundreds of thousands of organic thin film transistor arrays or other devices precisely and efficiently.

The end goal of the project is to establish the ability to print electronic components directly onto organic materials such as paper, fabrics, or plastic. This would allow the quick and relatively cheap printing of RFID tags, as well as everyday devices such as flexible watch displays, and could eventually lead to applications from the realm of science fiction, like electronic paper or eyeglasses with embedded displays.

Participants in the CONTACT project include Switzerland-based Schläefli Machines, the Technical University of Ilmenau, Belgium’s IMEC, and Imperial College London.

Source: RFID News

Thailand’s Hom Mali project is testing the use of RFID applications in its rice production supply chain. The Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) has created a prototype system which tracks the flow of rice in the Roi-Kaen Sarn cluster area of the country.

The system tracks the flow of rice from the Khon Kaen Bank of Agricultural Cooperatives, where the rice is grown, to the cooperatives’ community mill. Rice trucks will be tagged at the time of loading and then scanned when it reaches the mill, to confirm the receipt of the rice and its point of origin. The tags will include additional information such as weight loads and truck numbers. For the pilot project, 500 tags will be used.

SIPA representatives hope the pilot project, which is expected to conclude in September, will develop into a system that enables local farmers to better compete in the global market. In an effort to further boost the regional economy, the project also encourages local software companies to adopt domestic supply-chain management software instead of importing it from abroad.

The system’s prototype will also be tested on other local agricultural products such as tapioca.

Source: RFID News

The Zigbee spec started out in 2004 and that was known as the original Zigbee spec or Zigbee 2004. In 2006, they revamped the spec based on the feedback they got and that version ended up being called Zigbee 2006. In late 2007, they announced Zigbee Pro which most people think of as Zigbee 2007. However they actually created two versions of the spec. One of them is Zigbee 2007 and one of them is Zigbee Pro. The Zigbee 2007 update didn’t get a lot of press coverage so most people didn’t even know that they updated the Zigbee 2006 spec.

There were actually many changes from Zigbee 2006 to Zigbee 2007 and unfortunately, they weren’t clearly documented in the public version the spec. In fact, there is only one Zigbee spec which includes Zigbee and Zigbee Pro. To understand which features belong to Zigbee and which belong to Zigbee Pro, you have to turn to the feature set definitions documents.

I don’t really want to get into the differences between Zigbee and Zigbee Pro right now, but I thought I’d highlight some of the major differences between Zigbee 2006 and 2007. Also, I’ll complain a bit about how there is no changelist so we need to find a lot of the spec changes ourselves. Two of the main features that changed between Zigbee 2006 and 2007 is the addition of fragmentation and frequency agility. Fragmentation is the ability to handle data transfers that are larger than the maximum payload size that a frame can handle. An example would be to transfer 10 kB of data when the max frame payload size is much less than this. In order to transfer such a large chunk of data, you previously had to break it up into chunks in the application and send it via Zigbee. With fragmentation, the spec gives instructions on how to transfer such a large amount of data in a standardized way. It’s pretty similar to the way TCP handles fragmentation, ie: windowing and counters. This feature is optional in Zigbee 2007. (more…)