Finally an update!

After a busy couple of weeks finally an update!

Two weeks ago our MTS310 sensor boards arrived, naturally we immediately connected one of them to a mote to see what would happen.

Unfortunately everything we were running at the time was in TinyOS 1, this meant that measuring sporadically did not work. After careful consideration and deliberation we decided that it was better for us to start working on an implementation in TinyOS-2.1.0 and risk delays in order to lay a proper foundation for the future. TinyOS-2 is a lot more reliable, but unfortunately implementations for the magnet sensor, the mesh network and even getting the data from our base station onto a PC are not yet available. Another issue is the lack of documentation and programming examples. This meant that we had to start all over with little to no outside help.

Since then we've been working hard on getting everything up and running.

One of the first orders of business was to create a very simple program that could help us measure the range our motes can send over. This program basically uses the LEDS as a binary counter and increases the count when a radio message is received. Using this program we tested the range on our MICAz motes, indoor we managed a distance of 95m but outside we got as far as 120m which exceeded all expectations we had. After the distance test, we also wanted to get an idea of how the signal was affected when two motes are on separate floors. After not seeing any problems with one mote on the third floor and the second mote on the second floor we even saw a strong signal go through two floors with one mote on the third and one mote on the first floor.

The next step was to configure the magnet sensors and create a program that would read out these sensors at a set interval and transmit this data over a wireless network. As there was little documentation available this took longer than expected, and we have since been behind on our original schedule.

Currently we are working on getting the data from the base station to the PC via a serial port forwarder that we are developing in C#. Getting the data on screen has since been realized.

The next step which we are currently working on is to format this raw data into neat packages so we can start really testing the magnet sensor and subsequently migrate this into a database.