Sensors

Environmental Sensors

     Environmental sensors are abundant in today's world. Really sensors in general. There are accelerometers in your camera and your Wii controller, CCD sensors are really your solid state camera, and are commonplace in industrial and academic settings as well. Mostly though they are very overpriced. A good example is a typical set of Weather Sensors which are pretty darn expensive. 

     I think we should focus on sensors that are cheap and can easily be made redundant for cheap. Using mesh networking we can thing of local as well as distributed redundancy. If we can make stations that are fairly cheap ($300?) it might be better to just put 3 in a small area. If they all work you get distributed and differential data. If a sensor or even whole node fails then you still get your data point, just not as much small scale data.

Temperature Sensor

     Some sensors are incredibly cheap. Temperature for example. One of my long time favorites is the DS1820 type sensors from Maxim Semiconductor. It's about $2 in quantities of 1K and very accurate. It would be pretty cheap to have 5 even and they can all share one IO line using Maxim's 1-Wire technology. This sensor just needs a wire to connect it and some sort of weather proofing. Here's a cool ruggedized 1-Wire Temperature Sensor. Dallas/Maxim actually makes the DS1923 which is a temp/hum monitor. Should be the way to go.

 Humidity and Temperature Sensor

    I came across this combo Temperature/Humidity Sensor. Looks like it has a straight Serial Port connection so I could hook it up to one of the ports on my old favorite AT91SAM7S controller development board. Datasheet. Looks like this company Sensiron makes some cool stuff.

Cool Sewage Runoff Distributed Sensor Research Link.

Interesting researcher Adam Dunkels who does work in distributed Sensor Networks at his institute in Sweden. I found a GREAT interview that covers a lot of interesting sensor networking topics.

Pressure Sensor

     There's a lot of info on Pressure sensors out there. I found an interesting article. We probably don't need to make one, but it's always an option later to make it cheaper right? This company makes pressure sensors and just about everything else. No prices easily available though. Honeywell also makes barometers.

Wind Speed and Direction

     Goldmine. I found $100 retail source for wind speed and direction sensors. They also have a temp/hum sensor we might consider using as it's ruggedized.

CO2

     Telaire which is a GE Subsidary makes an OEM CO2 module. About $100 in decent quantity. Has RS-232/UART Interface.

Here's another cool sensor! Woo hoo!