Poly Deployment

The following image provides an overhead map of the deployment. Motes (represented by circles) are grouped in to three distinct categories by the immediate environment they monitor: grass, mulch, or a tree base. The labels A, B, and C specify the classification of each mote. The map also presents the approximate spatial relationship between motes. The number inside each circle representing a mote is used to uniquely identify each mote.

The following is a schematic profile of the motes' sensors buried in the ground.

Posted by Sam Small at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After a very long wait, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (BPI) received its soil-monitoring wireless sensor network today. The deployment currently consists of 8 remote sensor motes in the Poly courtyard and a data-collection base-station adjacently located indoors by a window. Full details of the deployment process will be presented in a forth-coming how-to article that is part of the "How-To" series we are currently publishing. In the meantime, enjoy some pictures.

Posted by Sam Small at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first step in creating a soil-monitoring sensor network is choosing the necessary and appropriate hardware components. The two most important decisions to make at this early planning stage are: which attributes do we want to monitor, and which components provide the best balance of cost, consistency, and compatibility. While it may seem that these two topics can be dealt with in tandem, practical constraints presented by the latter issue will ultimately dictate which properties we monitor.

With these constraints in mind, we have chosen to analyze soil temperature, soil moisture, surface temperature, and surface light intensity for the BPI deployment using the following hardware components:

Continue reading "How to Deploy a Soil-Monitoring Sensor Network, Part 1: Hardware Component Selection" »

Posted by Sam Small at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the arrival of the wireless sensor network at Poly, some of you may be wondering about the deployment/engineering process and how everything works (or what kind of data we will collect). For those interested, we have written a how-to guide outlining the entire process. The guide will be presented in installments here on the Poly blog. When all parts have been posted, the entries will be compiled into a single document available for download.

Posted by Sam Small at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A brief article featuring information about the forthcoming Poly deployment is available online from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute website. The article is also available from our site as a PDF file. Thanks to Sandy Loughlin for taking the pictures displayed in the article.

In other news, the current time frame for the launch of the Poly deployment is set for sometime between the end of February and mid-March.

Posted by Sam Small at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Welcome to the Poly Blog, an online journal documenting the educational-themed wireless sensor network deployment at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a high school in Baltimore, Maryland. The deployment at Polytechnic is funded by the Broader Impact for Graduate Students Transferring Engineering Principles (BIGSTEP) initiative sponsored by the Center for Educational Outreach (CEO) at Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Click here for a short article about the BIGSTEP program featured in the Johns Hopkins Engineer magazine.

As a BIGSTEP project, the sensor deployment at Polytechnic will be developed by the Hopkins Inter-Networking Research Group (HINRG) lab to support environmentaly themed K-12 classroom projects with the latest tools and techniques employed in engineering research. This blog will be used as a tool to document the birth of the deployment site and its progress, roadblocks, and results.

The deployment site at Polytechnic is an environmental courtyard that lies in the middle of the U-shaped school. The following pictures taken in December 2005 at BPI provide a cursory survey of the deployment site:

Posted by Sam Small at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)