Page History: Technologies & Tools @CISTER/IPP-HURRAY
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Page Revision: 2007/06/19 13:40
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§WSN Platforms
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§Overview
Our WSNs Lab (picture at right) is equipped with several WSN mote, sensor, data acquisition and interface boards.
We have around 200 mote platforms, from different manufacturers, namely:
- 75 MICAz motes (IEEE 802.15.4-compliant), from CrossBow
- 50 TelosB motes (IEEE 802.15.4-compliant), from CrossBow
- 5 motes (IEEE 802.15.4-compliant), from ATMEL
- 5 motes, from ScatterWeb
- 10 FireFly motes, from CMU
The picture below depicts some examples of available WSN technology (from CrossBow):
From top to bottom, left to right: TelosB mote, MICAz mote with housing, MICAz mote, data acquisition board, sensor board, Stargate Single Board Computer and three interface boards for interacting (programming, monitoring) with the motes: USB, Ethernet and RS-232.
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§MICAz
The MICAz is a 2.4 GHz, IEEE/ZigBee 802.15.4, board used for low-power, wireless, sensor networks. It uses an Atmel ATmega1281 8-bit micro-controller with 8KB of RAM and 128KB of ROM along with Chipcon’s CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4 standard-compliant radio transceiver for communication. The maximum packet size supported by 802.15.4 is 128 bytes and the maximum raw data rate is 250Kbps. It also has
several sensor boards providing light, temperature, audio, among other sensors.
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§FireFly
The FireFly Sensor Networking Platform is a low-cost low-power hardware platform. In order to better support real-time applications, the system is built around maintaining global time synchronization. The main Firefly board uses an Atmel ATmega1281 8-bit micro-controller with 8KB of RAM and 128KB of ROM along with Chipcon’s CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4 standard-compliant radio transceiver for communication. The maximum packet size supported by 802.15.4 is 128 bytes and the maximum raw data rate is 250Kbps. The FireFly board supports various external peripherals such as a sensor expansion card, high voltage power monitoring and control board, and a firefly-hardware-clock-sync hardware clock synchronization module. The sensor expansion card provides light, temperature, audio, passive infrared motion, dual axis acceleration and voltage sensing. The high voltage power monitoring and control board allows for sensing of current draw as well as on/off actuation of 120VAC appliances. The base FireFly platform provides an SDIO port which can be used for large FLASH storage or as a universal interface to PC compatible peripherals. The FireFly platform includes a downloading and code execution time profiling board for easy development.
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§TelosB
The TelosB is a 2.4 GHz, IEEE/ZigBee 802.15.4, board used for low-power, wireless, sensor networks. It has USB programming capability, Chipcon’s CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4 standard-compliant radio transceiver for communication with integrated antenna, a low-power microcontroller (TI-MSP430) from Texas Instruments with extended memory and several onboard sensors.
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§Simulators
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§Analysers
Concerning IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols, we use two different network/protocol analyser applications (sniffers):
- CC2420 Packet Sniffer for IEEE 802.15.4 v1.0 (Chipcon)
- IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee Network/Protocol Analyser (Daintree)
The first is quite adequate for providing a raw list of the packets transmitted. The (freeware) application works in conjunction with a CC2400EB evaluation board and a CC2420 radio transceiver. The second provides a more complete set of functionalities, namely graphical topology of the network, statistics, message flows, PAN information, association details, etc. The picture at right presents the required hardware for the Chipcon (top) and DainTree (bottom) sniffers.
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§Developed Tools & Software
§§§EditSectionPlaceHolder§§§Hands-On Lab