Wireless Sensor System for Monitoring and Control

With the fast development of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology, a large number of applications have been widely used over the past few years. As a matter of fact, wireless monitoring and control system is unavoidable one of the applications that consist of WSN nodes. A generic, modular and stackable WSN node, named UWASA Node has been developed by the University of Vaasa and Aalto University lately. Besides, SurfNet node, developed by Seinäjoki University of Applied Science, is designed as low-power consumption, high-data rate, small and powerful sensor node that is suitable to implement the monitoring and control tasks under multiple conditions. In this work, a wireless sensor system for monitoring and control is integrated and developed by one UWASA Node, one Linux board, and SurfNet nodes. Firstly, the basics of WSN including IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standard are introduced. Secondly, a new design and development of the hardware and software for the wireless sensor system is explained in detail. After that, several experiments are performed to verify the system performance due to the limited computational and power source of the sensor nodes in the WSN. In one word, this developed wireless sensor system provides a wireless solution for remote monitoring and control of the deployed environment.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

System Level Design of Software-Defined Radio Platform

This major qualifying project proposes a new single-board design for a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) On Board Unit (OBU) which consists of a Zynq 7030 system on a chip and AD9361 wideband transceiver. This software-defined radio (SDR) platform design is based on ZedBoard and FMcomms2. The advantages of this approach compared to the ZedBoard and FMcomms2 joint solution are smaller form factor, front end tuned to 5.9GHz and a more powerful processor. Since the prototype has not been manufactured due to the time constraints of this project, the working implementation of 6GHz DSRC radio 802.11p in GNU Radio has been confirmed on the lower capability hardware USRP2 and USRP N210 (Universal Software Radio Peripheral)

White RHINO: a low-cost communications radar hardware platform

Includes bibliographical referencesThe Electromagnetic spectrum has always been a very expensive resource and hence, has not been accessible to everyone. Yet, it is under-utilized. The new Whitespace Technology standards provide an efficient way to use the spectrum. However, the concept of shared spectrum introduced by the Whitespace Technology promises to reduce the cost of accessing the spectrum by a huge margin. Also, because the standards utilize the television channels, the VHF and UHF frequencies facilitate wireless transmission over large distances. This has provided impetus to various application developers. Using Whitespace Technology for Communications Radar is one such novel application which has great benefits for the African scenario. Here, the population is scattered and infrastructure for navigation and tracking is inadequate. But, there is a shortage of low-cost commercially available hardware platforms tailored for the application. In order to boost Whitespace-based Communications Radar application development, the White RHINO(Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for computation and radio) hardware platform was developed. It aims to fill the gap of low-cost commercial hardware platforms available for Whitespace-based Communications Radar. Being a Communications Radar platform, the White RHINO had to be designed keeping the standards and regulating body norms as yardsticks. However, an achievable radar performance of the platform under various scenarios was also estimated. The White RHINO contains an FPGA (the Zynq7000 series) which has dual embedded ARM processing cores. For the wireless interface, it contains a field programmable RF transceiver and an RF frontend section. The platform contains wired networking capability of 2 Gbps. The platform also has 512 MB DDR3 and 128 Mbit NAND ash as onboard memory. Finally, it has USB host, SDIO and JTAG for programmability and temperature sensors for system monitoring. The manufactured boards were tested under lab environment. It was found that except a failure on the RF transceiver section (due to a PCB footprint error), other interfaces were functional. The White RHINO successfully runs both U-Boot and Linux as operating systems. The error and other minor bugs have been corrected for the next fabrication run. Also, the cost of the complete White RHINO system is less than 1000 USD which makes it a very powerful platform and yet, less expensive than most of the commercially available platforms designed for similar applications

Implementation of the specification and schematics design for the Ethernet Fronthaul Module

Abstract. This Master’s Thesis covers theory and implementation of a device which is designed using a small base station as a reference. The theory chapter consists of the description and theory of a cloud radio access network architecture, a high data rate interface, an active antenna system and a designed device itself. This theory chapter is used to give reasons why the device is designed. The implementation chapter is divided into two chapters, which explains how the implementation specification is done and how the schematics were drawn. The schematics chapter covers the modifications, which are done to the hardware of the original small base station. Ethernet Fronthaul Moduulin implementointispesifikaation ja piirikaavion suunnittelu. Tiivistelmä. Tämä diplomityö käsittelee pienen tukiasemalaitteen pohjalta suunniteltavan laitteen, siihen liittyvän teorian sekä toteutuksen. Laitteeseen liittyvä teoria muodostuu neljästä kappaleesta, jotka käsittelevät cloud radio access network -arkkitehtuuria, nopean data määrän rajapintaa, aktiivi antenni systeemiä sekä itse suunnitellun laitteen teoriaa. Teorialla pyritään pohjustamaan syitä siihen, minkä vuoksi kyseinen laite on haluttu toteuttaa. Laitteen toteutusta käsittelevä kappale on jaettu kahteen osioon, joissa kuvataan implementointispesifikaation toteutus ja piirikaavioiden piirto. Piirikaavio kappaleessa käsitellään muutokset, jotka on tehty pohjana käytettävän tukiaseman laitteistolle

A HOST BOARD DESIGN FOR AN EXPERIMENT SYSTEM OF UNDERWATER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Evaluation of theoretical innovation in field experiments plays an important role for research in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). During the experiments, the problems of power consumption, costs, and assembly of underwater nodes concern researchers all the time. This project develops a host board for an UWSNs field experiment system. This host board solves the above problems by deploying power management module, utilizing cheap and low power consumption chips (Raspberry Pi and MSP430), and rationalizing layout. The main functions of the host board include battery monitoring, on-board DC converters, remotely power supply control, data ports bridge, and pluggable module for power supply and data ports. Experiments performed after the project prove that the host board could perfectly adapt to the underwater environment and also is applicable for many other field experiment systems

Public Transport Announcement Device For The Blind Using RFID- And ARM-Based Platform

This report presents the development of a public transport announcement device for the blind using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and ARM-based platform. The device functions to notify the blind person of the arrival and determining the identity of the bus using voice announcement. The device also constantly notifies the blind person of the next station ones the blind has departed the desired bus. The RFID tag chosen for this project is of active RFID type since the requirement is to detect a bus at a few tens of meter range. The RFID is based on nRF24L01+ transceiver module. This RFID operate at 2.4GHz frequency which is a free ISM band. Upon testing, the receiver was able to detect the ID transmitted up to 150feet in open air and direct line of sight condition. A programmer device which functions to program the RFID tag with a desired ID is also designed. The ARM-based Platform used is Freescale Freedom FRDM-KL25Z board which is based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ Core Processor. The RFID is interfaced with FRDM-KL25Z board via SPI communication. As for sound module, WTV020-SD MODULE is chosen and this module communicates with the FRDM-KL25Z board using virtual serial port created using digital I/O`s.

A WI-FI BASED SMART DATA LOGGER FOR CAPSULE ENDOSCOPY AND MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a non-invasive technology for capturing images of a human digestive system for medical diagnostics purpose. With WCE, the patient swallows a miniature capsule with camera, data processing unit, RF transmitter and batteries. The capsule captures and transmits images wirelessly from inside the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The external data logger worn by the patient stores the images and is later on transferred to a computer for presentation and image analysis. In this research, we designed and built a Wi-Fi based, low cost, miniature, versatile wearable data logger. The data logger is used with Wi-Fi enabled smart devices, smart phones and data servers to store and present images captured by capsule. The proposed data logger is designed to work with wireless capsule endoscopy and other biosensors like- temperature and heart rate sensors. The data logger is small enough to carry and conduct daily activities, and the patient do not need to carry traditional bulky data recorder all the time during diagnosis. The doctors can remotely access data and analyze the images from capsule endoscopy using remote access feature of the data logger. Smartphones and tablets have extensive processing power with expandable memory. This research exploits those capabilities to use with wireless capsule endoscopy and medical data logging applications. The application- specific data recorders are replaced by the proposed Wi-Fi data logger and smartphone. The data processing application is distributed on smart devices like smartphone /tablets and data logger. Once data are stored in smart devices, the data can be accessed remotely, distributed to the cloud and shared within networks to enable telemedicine. The data logger can work in both standalone and network mode. In the normal mode of the device, data logger stores medical data locally into a micro Secure Digital card for future download using the universal serial bus to the computer. In network mode, the real-time data is streamed into a smartphone and tablet for further processing and storage. The proposed Wi-Fi based data logger is prototyped in the lab and tested with the capsule hardware developed in our laboratory. The supporting Android app is also developed to collect data from the data logger and present the processed data to the viewer. The PC based software is also developed to access the data recorder and capture and download data from the data logger in real-time remotely. Both in vivo and ex vivo trials using live pig have been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed device

Real-Time FPGA-Based Systems to Remote Monitoring

Some industrial and laboratory applications such as control, monitoring, test and measurements, and automation require real-time systems for their development. Embedded systems for acquisition and processing often require the participation of the embedded operating system and therefore are necessary techniques that can accelerate software execution. The latest field-programmable gate arrays’ (FPGA) technology has blurred the distinction between hardware and software with embedded processors that allow the development of Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) running on operating systems. The widespread adoption of wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Wi-Fi in the last years has facilitated the use of these technologies to the development of real-time monitoring applications that combined with FPGA devices which has the advantages of low cost, flexibility, and scalability as compared with other commercial systems