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/