With dazzling wireless technology now available, it’s tempting for manufacturers to snatch up any wireless sensor that comes along as a means of optimizing processes and plant performance. This is especially true within the pharmaceutical industry, where vendors are plying industrial-strength wireless sensors for temperature, humidity and pressure, as well as sensitive process-monitoring wireless devices to support PAT applications.

But drug and other manufacturers may do well to exercise more caution when it comes to wireless. At least that’s the resounding message sent by a panel of experts who spoke on the current state of wireless standards at October’s annual ISA (International Society of Automation) Expo meeting in Houston.

The discussion drew an overflow crowd, and it was clear why the audience members, mostly from the end user community, had come: “Help!” If anything, wireless standards for industrial purposes have been getting more complex and confusing of late (see Box), and the audience was looking for a little comforting advice.

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As each day goes by, yet another mobile and (increasingly) wireless device hits the market. Anything from mobile phones to remote data collection devices (e.g. Zigbee endpoints)

This is all well and good, but powering these suckers and keeping them powered for anything up to 15 years or so is causing real head scratching in the embedded world. So what’s the solution?

Well, with new generation microcontroller devices capable of running of the juice of a lemon or even grapes!, the search is on for new ways to harvest energy.

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According to the company, IP architecture is the undisputed reference for communicating applications. The telecoms industry has invested resources to design and deploy a wide range of IP based solutions, both for industrial and consumer applications, and there are few systems designed today that do not consider inter-connecting to IP. For M2M industry players, IP represents the best way to secure investments in telecoms product design, ensuring a smooth transition path as communication technologies evolve.

Despite IP benefits, however, today's M2M application deployments are still largely based on non-IP capable network technologies and devices, due to strict requirements on power consumption, coverage, device resources, or deployment costs, the company said.

To overcome these barriers, Wavecom launches a technology that extends IP networks' reach. Thanks to a RIPlink gateway that is connected on one side to the IP network, and on the other side to one or more non-IP networks, standard TCP or UDP applications can run on non-IP devices and have access to the IP network resources. No IP stack is required on the device, and the underlying non-IP network remains unchanged. The client or server IP application running on the device is seen from the IP network as a standard IP application of the RIPlink gateway. The gateway can manage several devices simultaneously, on one or more different non-IP networks, the company said.

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[Akiba] WSN Blog has a good post on the BAIA Panel that recently took place at UC Berkeley. The theme of the panel is "Business Applications of WSNs" which is probably of interest to most of the readers of this site...[/Akiba]

BAIA has organized a Panel on “Business Models and Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks” on 10/08/2008. The event, sponsored by Pirelli Tyre, Telecom Italia and C’ Era una Volta, has taken place at the University of California at Berkeley with more than one hundred attendees from the academia and the industry. The Panel has been kindly introduced by Consul General of Italy in San Francisco Dott. Fabrizio Marcelli.

The distinguished panelists have been: - Prof. David Culler, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder of Arch Rock - Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder of Crossbow - Prof. Raju Pandey, UC Davis, CTO and Co-Founder of Synapsense - Prof. Kris Pister, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder of Dust Networks - Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder of Sentilla

The panel has been moderated by Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Professor at UC Berkeley, Co-Founder of Cadence Design Systems and Honorary Chairman of BAIA. The Panelists have discussed possible business models for WSNs and have answered the questions of the audience on the market perspectives for the technology and on the obstacles still to be overcome.

WSN Blog Link

"We are impressed with the design expertise of the Synapse engineering team" said Rich Howell, Director of Business Development. "We look forward to working with their team and their SNAP technology, which will help our customers bring wireless mesh applications to market."

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"This truly is a fantastic achievement for EnOcean and our energy-harvesting wireless technology," says Andreas Schneider, Executive Vice President and co-founder of EnOcean GmbH. "2008 has been a significant milestone in the development of EnOcean technology as the wireless standard in sustainable buildings across the world. Known as the Oscars of the electronics industry to many, becoming double Elektra Award winner means so much to our company and to the EnOcean Alliance."

New for 2008, the Wireless & Telecoms Design Award, sponsored by Gleichmann-Sunrise Ltd., was open to companies or research organisations that could demonstrate how they have successfully applied component and software technologies in a wireless or telecoms product or application. According to the judges, "This specialist design category brought out surprising levels of innovation in many of the entries".

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Contiki 2.2.2 is out! Changes since 2.2.1:

* uIPv6, the world's smallest fully compliant IPv6 stack
* SICSlowpan IPv6-over-802.15.4 header compression
* Atmel AVR Raven port with 802.15.4 MAC
* COOJA simulator speedup, improved MSPsim integration, and automated testing mechanism
* Major bugfix to the protosocket TCP code
* Binary packages for Tmote Sky/TelosB and Raven

Download: http://www.sics.se/contiki/

The first European Home Control & Energy Saving conference was a complete success and achieved high momentum in the industry, business and politics. More than 220 representatives from 13 nations took part in the event, which was presented by Danish Electricity Savings Trust (DEST) and the Z-Wave Alliance. Efficient solutions based on the home control technology for lowering the energy consumption in private households were introduced. Market leading companies used the conference as a platform to introduce current developments and trends in the home control area as well as new energy controlling products for the European market.

The home control market is continuously expanding in Europe: in the mean time more than 170 companies belong to the Z-Wave Alliance, the consortium of producers from the home technology branch. The 13 exhibitors in Copenhagen included companies like Modstroem, düwi, Hunter Douglas, Wintrop 2000, Everspring, Electronic Housekeeper, Danfoss, NorthQ, Horstmann, Elsparefonden and others. In the scope of the conference, more than 50 new home control products from the areas of energy savings, security, HVAC, lighting, entertainment, remote home monitoring and appliances for the European market were introduced.

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