WSN Update

(EETimes.com) - Airbee Wireless Inc. and Radiocrafts AS announced Thursday (April 28) they would team to deliver out-of-the-box ZigBee solutions.

Under the license agreement, Airbee (Rockville, MD) will supply its enabling intelligent software on ZigBee-ready module platforms from Radiocrafts (Oslo, Norway). This teaming will offer a readymade platform for integrators and OEMs looking for turnkey ZigBee solutions.

Radiocrafts, a provider of standard RF modules and systems for short-range radio, recently launched a series of ZigBee-ready RF modules operating at 2.45 GHz. The surface-mountable shielded modules measure only 16.5 x 29.2 x 3.5 mm, optionally available with integrated antenna or RF connector. They allow OEMs to easily add wireless communication to their space-limited products without RF design knowledge.

Airbee's intelligent network software has embedded ZigBee protocol software, including built-in test agents, self-tests, and support tools. The software enables rapid deployment of interoperable ZigBee networks.

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(vnunet.com) - As wireless connectivity grows in popularity, organisations are working harder than ever to find ways of optimising their operations.

Now that the internet is well established and the much-hyped dot com ideas of the late 1990s have turned into some kind of reality, the next step is to connect the myriad physical devices that surround us to the network.

Radio frequency identity (RFID) tags are seen as a major step in this direction, and are starting to make inroads into retail supply chains, airport baggage handling and countless other industries.

The next technology to play a part in achieving this optimisation could be sensor telemetry, a combination of sensors and two-way wireless communications that allows firms to gather detailed data from products, people and places.

Just as RFID allows organisations to sense and detect physical assets, sensor telemetry can give a live, detailed and continuously updated view about the status of those assets.

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LONDON, April 25 (PRNewswire) - End-user demand for a favourable cost benefit ratio is spurring efforts to increase the reliability and affordability of wireless sensors for building automation. Researchers in Europe are responding to this trend with greater technical sophistication in terms of better quality signals and reduced attenuation.

"Although wireless sensors eliminate a significant portion of the labour and wiring costs associated with wired networks, there is still room for improving power efficiency and the range of the wireless digital signal transmission," says Technical Insights Research Analyst Amit Jain (http://technicalinsights.frost.com).

Ease of deployment, retrofitting applications, and scalability of the network are going to be key driving factors for wireless sensors in building automation.

"Whether used in new construction or retrofit, flexibility is the ultimate benefit in deploying a wireless system as opposed to a wired network," says Mr. Jain. "These sensors can be located - or relocated - to optimise system performance, increase customer comfort and adapt to changing floor plans."

Here is a similar story out of Palo Alto, CA.

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(managinautomation.com) - Gardner Denver, like so many other manufacturers struggling to differentiate their products, is eyeballing new ways to build customer loyalty while making money. This predictive-maintenance service is a good opportunity to do just that. And it wouldn't be possible without the new sensor-based wireless networking technology that is now emerging. For the last few years, companies like Millennial Net Inc. (Burlington, MA), Ember Corp. (Boston), Dust Networks Inc. (Berkeley, CA) and Chipcon AS (Oslo, Norway) have been rolling out chips and protocol stacks for radio frequency (RF) communication. What they are selling are the guts to what is called a wireless mesh network -- an ad hoc, self-healing network that uses intelligent sensors to gather data from devices and equipment to be transported back to a central server.

The technology idea -- based on lowering infrastructure costs and gaining visibility into out-of-reach devices in the field -- has been percolating for a few years. But some of the key ingredients to really allow this technology to proliferate are just now rolling out. Things like an industrial-strength communication standard, the ability to connect the local mesh network with a wireless wide-area network, having a service-broker to manage the communication calls and designing applications that can operate on the wireless network are in the early introduction phase. Once everything comes together -- in about two-to-five years -- it will change the way manufacturers gather information without adding a lot of overhead.

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(BUSINESS WIRE) - April 20, 2005 - The ZigBee(TM) Alliance, an association of companies working together to enable wirelessly networked monitoring and control products based on an open global standard, today announced 20 new member companies, bringing its total membership to more than 150 companies. New member companies include: Contec Co., Ltd.; Crestron Electronics, Inc.; Digital Sun, Inc.; Eka Systems, Inc.; Fego Precision Industrial Co., Ltd.; Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; IBM Research GmbH; Indesign, LLC; INETCO Systems, Ltd.; Innovative Wireless Technologies; Johnson Controls; L.S. Research, Inc.; Mikrokrets AS; Mithril LLC; Signal Technology-AISD, a Crane Co. company; Trane; Urmet Domus SpA; Viconics Electronics, Inc.; Vitelec BV; and Xanadu Wireless.

The ZigBee Alliance also announced that Chipcon has been admitted as a "Promoter" level member. Chipcon, a long-time member of the ZigBee Alliance, will join Ember Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Honeywell, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, Philips and Samsung on the ZigBee Alliance Board of Directors. As a newly elected "Promoter," Chipcon accepts a leadership role in ZigBee Alliance activities and the development of the ZigBee specification.

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(trnmag.com) - The notion of buildings as "machines for living in," as pioneering modernist architect Le Corbusier put it in the 1920s, morphs to fit the technologies and issues of the day. In the '70s, it was energy efficiency. In the '80s, computer technology spawned "smart" buildings sporting automated controls and pre-configured information systems.

The latest crop of technologies [1,2] include microelectromechanical systems that combine sensors and actuators, wireless sensor networks, and fuzzy logic control schemes, and has the makings of a sophisticated nervous system.

This allows for close monitoring and adaptive control of building equipment, materials performance and environmental conditions, including temperature, air flow, and air chemistry.

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(rcrnews.com) - SAN DIEGO-A new report from ON World said sales of ZigBee products will start ramping up by the end of the year.

ZigBee will appear in consumer, residential and commercial markets first. However, the greatest returns are expected in the industrial sector, said the company.

"There are a growing number of companies eagerly awaiting the ZigBee networking protocol to become publicly available," said Charlie Chi, ON World's senior analyst. "Despite some confusion and controversy about ZigBee's suitability for certain markets, the demand for interoperable, low data rate, and low-cost wireless networking solutions remains strong."

ON World said it has identified two major groups within the low-data-rate wireless competitive landscape: high-volume original equipment manufacturer markets that are likely to support ZigBee and niche vertical markets with customized proprietary solutions targeted at long-range or ultra-low-data applications with intense robustness and reliability requirements.

The two largest limitations to widespread adoption of wireless sensing solutions are complex installations and lack of seamless integration, said the company.

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(Wi-FiPlanet.com) - When it comes to introducing 802.15.4 into the marketplace, wireless mesh provider Dust Networks is taking what company executives say will prove to be the easy way.

While others are pushing for consumer adoption of the wireless standard, Dust is targeting the commercial and industrial sectors, where its executives say adoption is likely to come first.

Commercial users have the most to gain from 802.15.4 right now, says Dust's Vice President of Marketing, Rob Conant. In offices and warehouses, engineers are rigging sensors to track motion, temperature, lighting, pressure and other factors, but these are costly deployments. "People are putting these sensor networks out there in the world, but it takes a lot of labor," Conant says. "You have a $10 sensor, and it costs you $400 to install it in a building."

To address the problem, Dust this spring added 802.15.4-compliant radio hardware to its SmartMesh wireless sensor networking product line, in a further effort to target large-scale commercial users worldwide.

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APRIL 12, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke yesterday with Warren Weiss, a general partner at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Foundation Capital, about the types of energy management technology companies and products that the venture capital firm is investing in.

One of the companies you've invested in is Dust Networks [a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of wireless networks]. What kind of work are they doing in the energy industry?

They're at the periphery at the energy side. Early applications have been around industrial automation. Some utilities are exploring the use of the technology to measure the temperature of a plant and lower the costs of doing so on a much more even basis, because you can put sensors in a lot of places in a plant where you can't with wireline sensors.

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CHICAGO, RFID JOURNAL LIVE!, April 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Oracle and Xpaseo, a leading provider of RFID appliances, today announced a partnership to offer an integrated software and hardware solution for managing an RFID deployment. Xpaseo will embed components of Oracle Sensor-Based Services into its XGate devices to help companies implement and manage ongoing operations and reduce the total cost of ownership of RFID deployments.

The new offering enables companies to implement an RFID or sensor network using their existing investments in enterprise software. Relying on Oracle Sensor-Based Services, a comprehensive set of capabilities to capture, manage, analyze, access and respond to data from sensors RFID tags, customers can manage an entire RFID network from a single interface.

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(EETimes.com) - Manhasset, N.Y. - The ZigBee Alliance has announced the first four platforms to successfully complete interoperability testing for the short-range wireless technology. The platforms will be used to test ZigBee offerings that emerge in the coming months and, therefore, pave the way for ZigBee deployment in applications such as industrial control, HVAC and home automation.

"We've been testing with each other since December 2003," said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance, "and now we're coming out of the gate with four platforms with the full [IEEE 802.15.4] radio and ZigBee stack — the complete platform." The platforms are from CompXs Inc., Ember Corp., Chipcon Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The latter two use a ZigBee protocol stack from Figure 8 Wireless, which Chipcon acquired in January.

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(San Francisco Chronicle) - Scattered throughout John James' horse ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains are wireless sensors he uses to measure temperature and humidity.

Inside the sensors, communication devices the size of a quarter, called nodes, send streams of messages to each other, conveying the temperature and humidity information to a base station in James' house.

The nodes wake up, relay data from one to another, synchronize their clocks and then fall back to sleep. They sleep 99.5 percent of the time, allowing their batteries to last up to five years.

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(CIO.com) - At Edison's Nuclear Generating Station in San Onofre, Calif., each time one of the large, '70s-era motors fails, the plant's power output drops between 20 percent and 25 percent for the three days it takes to fix or replace the equipment. The company then must spend as much as $400,000 to buy replacement power at emergency rates to meet customers' energy demands. Until now, engineers checked the motors' temperature monthly, hoping to predict which motors were about to fail so that they could preemptively rebuild or replace them during scheduled maintenance periods. Monthly manual readings, however, don't provide enough trend information to be particularly useful. "We did monthly readings and we missed a lot of things," says Lloyd Pentecost, maintenance engineer at the San Onofre plant. After two motors failed, it became clear that monthly monitoring was insufficient. "We increased to weekly readings, and it made no difference," he says, since readings can vary based on the time of day or outside temperature. Then Pentecost installed Wi-Fi-based sensors on eight motors to collect real-time trend data. "Once you get real-time data, the problem jumps out at you," he says. But Wi-Fi is expensive and poses a potential security risk. So Pentecost decided to try out wireless mesh networked sensors.

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(RedHerring.com) - When Mike Horton first pitched his University of California, Berkeley, graduate research project to venture capital firms in the fall of 1997, the battery-sized sensors were a hard sell. Eight years later, his sensor network company, Crossbow, has more than $16 million in annual revenue and two consecutive years of profitability under its belt.

A string of wireless sensor network (WSN) startups has popped up to provide a formidable challenge to Mr. Horton and his company, but he believes Crossbow’s comprehensive package sets his products apart. While many competitors focus on niche markets or specific technologies in WSN—such as home automation or the network—Crossbow aims to dominate by selling a vast array of customers everything they need.

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(MassHighTech.com) Wireless sensor networking is opening a window for hundreds of companies that can use the technology to cut costs, maintenance and time by more than half. The reliability and scalability of mesh wireless sensor networking has helped companies such as Millennial Net in Burlington, which was researching the technology for less than five years and has now brought it to market.

Late last month, the company inked a deal with Oregon-based window and door manufacturing giant Jeld-Wen to power the company’s new Building Envelope Environmental Monitoring Service using its MeshScape network. The service will allow Jeld-Wen to monitor environmental conditions in a building, including inside and outside walls, doors, and windows.

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Here is a Q & A with John P. Peeters, President and Founder of Gentag, Inc. He discusses how cell phones are the perfect vehicle for the delivery of wireless sensor data.

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