Jun 21 2010
During the recent 2010 Sensors Expo & Conference, IBM announced a freely downloadable software development kit, named called Mote Runner that could enable governments and companies expand their abilities to harness digital devices and sensors to design and make intelligent systems and products and systems. The kit will make the wireless sensor networks (WSN) easy to use and program so that they can be adopted worldwide.
This kit offers a programmer-friendly and open platform that could connect up actuator motes and the sensor in a wireless sensor network (WSN). Motes, also called wireless sensor nodes, are utilized to collect sensory information like temperature, movement, or light, and communicate that data across a network of wireless sensors.
IBM wireless card
Currently, most of the wireless sensor networks that are able to track and react to environmental or physical conditions are difficult to program since they are proprietary, therefore restricting universities, governments and companies to benefit from them. Such challenges are being addressed by the Mote Runner.
For instance, Mote Runner will be able to assist a building management organization to install sensors inside a high rise building. This technology can help the company to create sensor applications for monitoring water systems, room temperature, and so on. These companies will be able to simulate the positioning of sensors in the building and also test their communications. Once these sensors have been installed in the building, they could be also reprogrammed.
MEMSIC, a leading sensor solution and micro-electromechanical systems vendor, will also be providing the Mote Runner on IRIS, which is among the most widely used sensors.
With the cost of transistors ($0.00001 each) plummeting with increasing densities, companies are focusing on transistor-rich WSNs and analytics for better understanding of the external and internal systems that impact and support their businesses, enhance the performance and behavior of societal and business systems, take more informed, better real-time decisions by application of analytics to sensors’ captured data, and gain insight into societal and business systems’ situations as soon as they occur.