Rafe Needleman likes small companies developing new ideas. (Remember "Cypak mounts CPUs on paper" a week ago?)
This time, he discovered Dust Inc. based in Berkeley. He says that "Dust Inc.'s tiny sensors could one day remotely monitor traffic, temperature, and troop movements." Here are some excerpts of his article.
Dust Inc. designs small computers it calls motes, and uses them as platforms to collect data with a variety of sensors. Currently, a single mote is a little bigger than a 9-volt battery, but the computers are getting smaller as Dust continues to design custom hardware for its clients, which range from startups like Sensicast to established sensor companies like Honeywell.
The motes have radios in them to communicate their sensor readings. This is where things get really interesting. The low-power radios attached to these low-power computers don't have enough range to continuously broadcast back to a central base station. Instead, they wake up once in a while, at predetermined times, and blast their data to a nearby mote, which then collects and retransmits that data to another nearby mote, and so on, until finally the data reaches a central collection node or recording computer.
This is what's known as a self-organizing sensor network, and it's a powerful idea. One obvious application is military: Air-drop a bunch of vibration sensors into the Iraqi desert and they can report vehicle and personnel movement. A similar technique could be used to gather data on seismic activity or monitor highway traffic.
Here is Needleman's conclusion.
Mesh networking isn't a brand-new idea. And likewise, small computers and sensors are hardly innovative. But combining small sensors, low-power computers, and mesh radios in the manner I've just described makes for a new technological platform that already has important uses and applications.
Source: Rafe Needleman, Business 2.0, February 13, 2003
10:58:29 AM Permalink
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