PC Magazine
by Lance Ulanoff 10.29.03
"Sensor nets are a logical step in the miniaturization of technology. Eventually, Intel envisions "a grain of sand that holds computation [and] communication [components], senses vibration, movement, [and more]—all on a single chip." But what a tiny CPU can do is only part of the equation. It has to be cheap, or at least cost-efficient, and be adaptable to a wide variety of uses. And this intelligent sand grain would be grouped with thousands of other grains, "so you need it to be self organizing, self maintaining," {Alan} Mainwaring points out. These grains need to be able to find each other, establish communications, and then work together. Thus, as {Alan} Mainwaring explains it, instead of sensing just the local environment around a single grain, you have an entire desert of sand that is sensing, communicating, and collecting information about a vast area. The goal is for these sensors to then deliver the gathered intelligence to a central server or even a laptop."
"Sensor nets have yet to reach this level of sophistication. In fact, there are still major hurdles to overcome. For now, the individual wireless nodes in a sensor net, known as motes (so-called because the ultimate goal is intelligent dust), are much larger than grains of sand, let alone specs of dust, and getting 1,000 nodes to do something sensible is incredibly complex. The current approach for making even small sensor networks useful is to simply gather their information into databases and run queries to find out what all the sensors are seeing."
"Intel researchers have built individual sensor nodes that weigh just a few ounces and pack an ARM CPU (the hope is to upgrade to StrongARM processors) and Bluetooth radio into a cubic inch. The company calls a collection of motes communicating and working together using Intel's software and hardware an iMote. This iMote platform also works with an 802.11 gateway, making it accessible from a standard laptop. During our meeting, I was able to check out some of these very cool motes. An individual device could fit in the palm of my hand and was encased in white, weather-resistant plastic, making the mote look like some kind of plumbing fixture. To access the technical guts, you unscrew the plastic cap from the mote case."
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Great Duck Island off the Maine Coast where a test of wireless sensors was conducted:
