I'm pretty slow on my magazine reading from the states since I have to wait for my mom to send me a care package of some of my requested magazines and American goods. She normally purchases them when she has a chance and stockpiles them until she can make one large shipment to me. I figure that on average, I'm about 2-3 months behind on my magazine reading.

So I was suprised when I picked up Issue #211 of Circuit Cellar . It's an excellent issue for me with two very relevant articles to what I am doing now. One of them is a very good article on wireless sensor network platforms. The other is an article on the basics of antenna simulation. Both of which I am interested in.

 The wireless sensor network platform article is the one that most readers of this post will be interested in. It was written by a research team at Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia that was trying to build a wireless sensor network. They compared the different platforms (MicaZ, Telos, CC2431, etc...), different WSN OSes (Contiki ranked high, but they chose SOS), and proposed their own hardware design using a CC2420 and a 2-layer board. Excellent!

The antenna simulation article goes through a tutorial of how to simulate an antenna with free (NEC2 , QUCS ) and paid software (Sonnet ). I need to start thinking about developing the board hardware soon and will need to go through the RF and antenna design when I do. I'm thinking to do a similar post, but specific to 2.4 GHz and using only free or open source tools. 

Well, that's about it. If you get a chance to pick up a copy of Circuit Cellar 211, you should check it out.

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