Abstract

Background/Question/Methods In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a promising technological advance in environmental monitoring systems. Even though the potential for WSNs to contribute significantly to ecological advances remains high, their adoption has been overshadowed by fairly steep technical knowledge requirements. To alleviate this problem and promote adoption of WSNs to the ecological community, we have developed a system called SensorKit. SensorKit provides an end-to-end system from the sensors to the database. It includes commercially available hardware (sensors and node platforms), and open-source software, for remote configuration and control, data transport, and storage. SensorKit also includes installation and operation tutorials, which together provide a user with the basic know-how required to deploy a sophisticated embedded sensing system. The SensorKit development model is open and community-based. Our goal is to catalyze a community of users and developers to exchange ideas and experience, identify and provide new capabilities, and provide on-going bottom-up support for current and future configurations and features. Results/Conclusions SensorKit features include adaptive sampling capability; wired and wireless communication between nodes, the controlling computer, and the Internet; compatibility with existing sensing hardware (eg dataloggers) as well as analog, digital, and advanced sensors (eg imagers); an expandable architecture to support multiple nodes and sensors; solar and battery power operation; deployment optimization tools; and data integrity …

Date

August 7, 2008

Authors

Fabio Silva, Eric A Graham, Annette DeSchon, Yeung Lam, Thanos Stathopoulos, Wei Ye, Jeffrey Goldman, Terry Benzel, William Kaiser, John Wroclawski

Journal

The 93rd ESA Annual Meeting