There’s lots of talk about wireless sensor networks these days, with differing communications schemes and management layers, but for the most part, it seems to be a roll-your own thing. If you want to put together a sensor network, then you need to design and configure the thing explicitly. There are wireless sensor nodes out there, but at least at first glance, it doesn’t appear that there’s much in the way of “complete” systems.
Libelium has addressed that with a plug-and-play approach that they call WaspMote Plug & Sense. Each “mote” has room for six sensors to be plugged in and just work. The sensors can be programmed or configured wirelessly, and the network can stay up during the whole process. Just like plugging in a USB peripheral. The sensors communicate with the Meshlium gateway, which can send data to and from the Cloud.
They make a wide range of different sensors, which is good – because this is a closed system; only Libelium sensors can be plugged in. The hub itself has a temperature sensor (which helps when compensating for the temperature sensitivities of the sensors) as well as an accelerometer. Given that this thing is going to be mounted to a telephone pole or some other such stationary location, the requirement for an accelerometer is a bit puzzling (earthquake detector?). I checked in with them, and it sounds like it was simply available on the base board that they used for the design, and it can be used to indicate any attempts at tampering.
You can find out more in their release…
