GROUP WIRELESS LOCATION TRACKING WITH AN ANDROIDSINKBy Ronny L. Bull, Alexander B. Stuart, and Edward Spetka
CS 528 – Professor Geethapriya Thamilarasu
OBJECTIVES
Create a lightweight, efficient platform for tracking the location of elements of a group
i.e. Emergency, military, and leisure scenarios
Utilize Micaz hardware and TinyOS software
Plot positions of elements on simple interactive map interface
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
Utilize common, inexpensive hardware Android smart phones or tablets
Incorporate GPS technology Ideal for outdoor situations
Take advantage of Google Maps API
Create simple parsing interface
PREREQUISITE INFORMATION
NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) packets contain critical information
Internal to the NMEA packet is the command/reply fields which contain the most important information
Elements of the command/reply fields are called sentences e.g. timestamp, coordinates, direction, distance
above sea level
IMPLEMENTATION
Hardware: Two Micaz motes One USB programming board One MTS420/400CC sensor board One Android device (emulated) One desktop computer (Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS
Server)
Software Google Maps API TinyOS 2.x Perl and Java
IMPLEMENTATION
DIFFICULTIES
MTS420/400CC sensor board lacks drivers for TinyOS Independent of 1.x and 2.x TinyOS versions
IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth protocols are not supported by TinyOS
TinyOS code based died sometime around 2008/2009
Unable to slow down time without proportionally decreasing productivity
IDEAL IMPLEMENTATION
IEEE 802.11or
Bluetooth
DEMONSTRATION
The Android device is emulated in our demonstration
The GPS NMEA packets are hard coded into the GPS mote
Only the coordinate information is used from the NMEA packets
WHAT WE LEARNED
Working with WSNs requires good coordination between all involved systems
QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
What else would like you to know or tell?
P.S.All code is available via subversion at
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-wsn-cs528/