What are sensor networks good for? [LWN.net]

What are sensor networks good for?

Posted Dec 20, 2007 18:42 UTC (Thu) by kbob (guest, #1770)
Parent article: Hardware Fun with the Arduino board

My imagination is failing me.  What are people using sensor networks for?  I try to think of
things I want to sense but draw a blank.

Thanks.

to post comments

For fun and anything that doesn't exists.

Posted Dec 22, 2007 9:48 UTC (Sat) by amartoq (guest, #1712) [Link] (1 responses)

I am in the process of a home-made MIDI pedal for controlling in a different way my PODXTLive
[1] device and a "teleprompter" software that jumps the lyrics in my notebook screen. The
lyrics software [3] is being used for practice and even live (at least once), because all
members of my band have little time to memorize lyrics and even the chords of the songs! It
allow us to play any song we got in the computer (and the public ask to play) even if we never
played it before...

So, the MIDI pedal will make all this song/lyrics/effects transitions very easy... Of course,
I could buy a real MIDI controller like the behringer fcb1010 [2]; but is much more fun to do
it yourself, besides that there is no existing software that do what I'm doing and pretending
to do in the near future: controlling current song, lyrics, channel POD setup and even some
chopters and background sound tracks we use on some songs.

I'm using PIC18F4550 from Microchip, those are not linux-friendly like the AVR, but something
is available[4].

[1] http://line6.com/podxtlive/
[2] http://www.behringer.com/FCB1010/
[3] No link yet, I'll release the software once I get version 0.3 ready (Version 0.1 was a 1
hour python programming session that just displayed lyrics, Version 0.2 was a 1 week python
programming that supported a list of songs and change to prev/next)
[4] http://www.yty.net/pic/enindex.html

For fun and anything that doesn't exists.

Posted Dec 22, 2007 12:45 UTC (Sat) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

You could give SDCC a try, it should support the PIC18F4550:
http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/

What are sensor networks good for?

Posted Jan 4, 2008 5:03 UTC (Fri) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link] (1 responses)

Classic examples of sensor nets include factories and warehouses. If you can just stick wireless sensors in place and let them self-organize a network, that's cheaper than wiring the place up ... and easier to repair, too, when a forklift accident damages something. (People being much harder to repair!)

My favorite example is ecological though. Small cheap sensors are spread throughout a forest ... at lots of different altitudes. You can study not just microclimates, but nanoclimates, and their relationships to forest health.

What are sensor networks good for?

Posted Jan 12, 2008 0:35 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

As a random aside, Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ has a distant 
descendant of sensor networks (`localizers') play a significant part in 
the plot.

(But then Vinge *is* an ex-CS prof who writes his books in Emacs, so I 
guess it's not unusual that he knew about this sort of thing years before 
the rest of us spotted it... of course he's inspired the name of at least 
one program as well, GNU Mailman. Thankfully this one is rather less 
malevolent than Vinge's.)