.NET in the Embedded World w/ Colin Miller

Modern computing models expected to accelerate growth of Sensor Networks

netmf_ba — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:07:00 GMT

I just got back from San Francisco where I participated in a panel discussion at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. On the panel with me were representatives from Sun SPOT (Arshan Poursohi), Sentilla (Cory...(read more)

Welcome to our experiment in interactive blogging!

netmf_ba — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:54:00 GMT

Several months ago, we added a link to the .NET Micro Framework home page called “Ask Colin”. This link provided you with an avenue to get the information that you need to evaluate and eventually use the Micro Framework. Thanks to you, the initiative proved to be a great success and we received a lot of great questions from the community! I was able to hear directly from you what is not well understood as well as obtain suggestions on what more we could be doing. One of the biggest challenges with this initiative, however, was that it was 1:1 – I was the only one hearing your questions and suggestions, and you were the only one who heard the responses.

With the launch of this blog, you can still post questions and suggestions to me by simply clicking the “email button” on top of the blog. The difference is that I will try to make our interactions available on the blog whenever possible so others can benefit from it as well – with due respect to your privacy, of course. The hope is that this process will generate richer discussions around common topics of interest and could spark additional ideas. The content on the blog will be meta tagged by topic and will be searchable. So you can either see if your question has already be answered or just email me for information. Your choice – in either case.

As always, I value your inputs and look forward to hearing from you!

Colin

Wireless Sensor Networking

netmf_ba — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:54:00 GMT

After 10 years of research and trials, the drivers that will bring sensor network technologies to an increasing number of applications are growing. As resources become more scarce and expensive, managing them more accurately become critical and economic. Take Energy for example. As you look around your house, how many things are taking energy that you don’t even notice? How much are they costing you and how do you decide whether you should keep using them, replace them, or just manage them more carefully? Or take an industrial environment. How do you balance the frequency with which you send personnel out to maintain hardware with the cost of sending them out. If the hardware could tell you how it is performing, you cannot optimize the scarce resource of trained personnel. Without data, no one can manage the resources that we use.

One impediment to the instrumentation of the world around us is that cost and much of that cost is tied up in the software needed to make these sensors run and communicate with larger systems. As long as these solutions require specially trained engineers using specialized tools and complex algorithms, the progress will be slow and expensive.

The .NET Micro Framework provides part of a solution that builds a uniform development environment from sensors to servers. All of the applications in the solution can now use .NET and Visual Studio. In addition, the applications can use the flexible and high productivity interfaces like Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) that allows devices to startup, find the network, ‘discover’ other service providers or consumers on the network, and negotiate the interaction – all without having to have an expert configure the system or install the device. It just works and this is what it will take to make the sensor networks extend beyond the university laboratory.