Students Win Award for Wireless Sensor Design
Three Jonsson School students have won an engineering design competition by devising an inexpensive, energy-efficient wireless sensor that can be arrayed in networks for environmental monitoring and other applications.
Competition winners, from left, Andrea Grosso, Greg Mordi and Gustavo Litovsky.
They started with a low-power microprocessor and then programmed it to sleep as much as possible, according to Gustavo Litovsky, a senior in electrical engineering who spearheaded the project, working with Greg Mordi, also a senior, and Andrea Grosso, a junior at the Jonsson School.
They also focused on how the device handles wireless transmission itself, which is the single biggest drain on power.
“We decided early on that storing a lot of data and then transmitting it fast might be a good strategy,” Litovsky said, “and so that’s the approach we took.”
They also selected their transmission frequency carefully. By opting for a less heavily trafficked frequency, they saved the power required for a transmission to punch its way through a more popular and noisier environment. Plus they designed their own low-cost global positioning module.
The initial sensor monitors temperature, but its capabilities can be expanded to monitor light, humidity, vibration and other environmental conditions. A medical version might monitor vital signs of the elderly, firefighters in action or other groups.
In the end, the three students produced a prototype that can be inexpensively manufactured and then cost-effectively arrayed in the natural environment in great enough numbers to produce high-resolution data. With some more work they hope to get it to operate virtually indefinitely, in part by enabling it to evaluate its own energy consumption history and modify its behavior accordingly.
“Very nicely done, particularly for a student effort,” wrote one of the judges.
The competition was sponsored by Texas Instruments, which selected winners at several participating universities.
