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by Big Gav
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energy efficiency,
ge,
monitoring,
natural gas,
rise of the machines
GigaOm has an article on GE's efforts to make turbines for power generation using natural gas more efficient - Putting data centers on turbines to save billions of dollars.
“We’re almost putting a data center on a gas turbine,” Ruh said during a session at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on Wednesday morning, referencing the hundreds of sensors the company is placing on those machines to capture data. If those sensors, combined with GE’s (or anyone’s) software for managing and analyzing the data, is able to improve efficiency by just 1 percent, that could save nearly $6 billion a year.
Or think about air travel. Forty-one percent of unplanned downtime for airlines is caused by mechanical errors, Ruh explained, so GE wants to be able to predict when its engines or other airline systems will fail. With this knowledge, carriers can fix problems during scheduled downtime and save everyone precious time.
Speaking of jet engines, Ruh noted just how much potentially predictive data they’re generating. If someone captured everything coming off of a jet engine, he said, “We’re talking several hundred terabytes a day.”
However, he acknowledged, the macro effects of the industrial internet — cost savings, carbon-footprint reductions and efficiency gains — will come with shifts in the employment sector that might not be good for everyone involved. “There will be new kinds of jobs that get created that don’t exist today,” Ruh said. But, he added, “Some things people used to do will be done more efficiently through these machines.”
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by Big Gav
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china,
monitoring,
transport
Technology Review has an article on using data from taxi GPS units to try to optimise road design to reduce traffic jams - GPS Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams.
Beijing is a city famous for traffic jams. In 2006, rush hour reportedly lasted 11 hours a day, and the city has been called a "virtual car park" during daylight hours. As in most major cities, urban planners have been trying for years to relieve the pressure by adding new roads or public transit lines, or providing better enforcement for traffic laws.
Now a group working at Microsoft Research Asia has shown that tracking the location of taxicabs could be a better way to identify the underlying problems with a city's transportation network, helping officials determine how to best ease congestion.
The researchers used GPS data from more than 33,000 Beijing taxicabs. That data was collected in 2009 and 2010. The researchers were not just looking for bottlenecks—trouble spots that regular commuters may know only too well. "[Congested] road segments are only the appearance—they're not the problem," says Yu Zheng, who led the research. "We try to identify the true source of the problem in our work."
The researchers presented their work last week at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, which took place in Beijing.
To get at underlying causes of traffic problems, the researchers needed to get information about the trips people are taking—where journeys start, finish, and how a commuter travels in between. The researchers divided Beijing into regions and analyzed the taxi data to find places where two regions weren't properly connected.
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ambient energy,
james gosling,
monitoring
The Server Side notes that James Gosling (the guy who invented Sun's Java programming language) has joined a company developing remote sensor robots - Gosling sails away from Google and Android.
So, James has moved from the company that brought us a software program called Android, to a company named Liquid Robotics, that makes real-life androids. Well, perhaps they're not quite 'androids' in the truest sense of the word, but they are nifty little robots that use solar-power and energy harvested from the ocean's waves to sail around the globe collecting reams of information and data.
Apparently, this type of remote data collection is a billion dollar industry, and if Liquid Robotics can manage to perfect the onboard robotics embedded into their tiny little 'wave gliders', while figuring out how to collect, manage and interpolate all of the information that gets sent back to the data center, then a good chunk of that billion dollars could be theirs. "I'll be involved in both the onboard software - sensing, navigation and autonomy - and in the datacenter, dealing with the in-rush of data. The current systems work well, but they have a variety of issues that I look forward to working on." Says James Gosling on his nighthacks blog.
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air transport,
energy efficiency,
ibm,
location based apps,
monitoring,
tom tom
The SMH has an article on a smartphone app that could help motorists reduce the amount of fuel wasted in traffic jams - IBM smartphone app predicts traffic jams.
IBM is testing smartphone software designed to predict traffic jams and warn motorists before they even take to the roads.
IBM said that its employees in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas of Northern California have been testing technology that "will ultimately help drivers around the world" avoid fouled traffic.
Those involved in the pilot project agree to have location-sensing capabilities in their smartphones automatically track where they drive and when, according to IBM Smarter Traveler program manager John Day.
The information is fed through the internet to computers that identify patterns such as commutes to and from work.
Meanwhile, data collected from roadway censors commonly used for online traffic maps is analysed to determine conditions that usually lead to trouble.
For example, congestion at a certain off-ramp or bridge entrance may consistently lead to traffic backing up in another area. The results are combined to form personalised predictions of when a motorist is apt to run into highway headaches.
"We wanted to take advantage of analytic tools to provide predictive capabilities; to get correlations with minor slowdowns and major ones that happen after that," Day told AFP. So you can run a query at any point for a journey and predict 35 or 40 minutes in advance what it will look like, then couple that with a personal approach for the individual traveler."
IBM researchers worked with California state highway authorities and a Mobile Millennium Team at the University of Berkeley, California, on the project.
The smartphone application lets people receive customized alerts warning of probable traffic trouble before they set out on commutes or other routine drives.

Cryptogon notes that while this sort of mass monitoring can serve useful purposes, it can also be put to more annoying uses -
Data from TomTom Navigation Devices Used by Dutch Police to Set Speed Traps.
Dutch drivers might have wondered how it was that speed traps were always in just the right place to catch speeders. It turned out to be simple enough: if they owned a TomTom, their in-car satnav was spying on them, and the aggregated data about cars’ speed was being sold via the government to the police – who used it to set the traps.
The company, which is Europe’s largest satnav manufacturer, was forced this week into an embarrassing apology as the revelation emerged alongside its first-quarter financial earnings, which showed weak demand and let it to forecast growing sales from “service revenues” – including, it said, selling data to governments.
In a public apology (repeated in a video on YouTube), TomTom’s chief executive Harold Goddijn said the company sold the anonymous data believing it would be used to improve safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks.
“We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it,” he wrote, and promised licensing agreements would “prevent this type of use in the future.”
Normally the aggregated data would be used to tell subscribers to TomTom services how to route around traffic conditions and give improved estimates of journey time. The sale of data to the government was intended to help it understand causes of congestion and accidents.
But the police had a simpler idea for how to use the data to offset the cost of buying it, and followed that as well.
The timing of the admission comes just after a wave of concern over data collected by smartphones and passed back to the companies controlling them, such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.
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by Big Gav
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energy efficiency,
green buildings,
monitoring,
sensors
Technology Review has a look at a technique for reducing sensor power consumption and extending their range - Sensors Use Building's Electrical Wiring as Antenna.
Wireless sensors scattered throughout a building can monitor everything from humidity and temperature to air quality and light levels. This seems like a good idea--until you consider the hassle and cost of replacing the sensors' batteries every couple of years. The problem is that most wireless sensors transmit data in a way that drains battery power.
Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a way to reduce the amount of power a sensor uses to transmit data by leveraging the electrical wiring in a building's walls as an antenna that propagates the signal. The approach extends a wireless sensor's range, and it means that its battery can last up to five times longer than existing sensors, say the researchers.
The technology, called Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure (SNUPI), sends a small trickle of data wirelessly at a frequency that resonates with the copper wiring in a building's walls, says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Washington. The copper wiring, which can be up to 15 feet away from the sensors, picks up the signal and acts as a giant receiving antenna, transmitting the data at 27 megahertz to a base station plugged into an electrical outlet somewhere in the building.
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ibm,
minority report,
monitoring
While I quite like IBM's "smarter planet" marketing campaign and the use of advanced analytics in applications like smart grids, this particular use of data analysis seems rather evil. From Gizmodo - Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It's a Very Bad Idea.
IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here's the full quote from Deepak Advani:
Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.
If that sounds scary to you, that's because it is. First it's the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it's the potential terrorists. Then it's everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.
It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.
The reality is that it's not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that's not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn't end well for more than 11 million people.
And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is the wrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.
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by Big Gav
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global warming,
monitoring
Technology review has an article on the use of drone planes to gather additional data on the atmosphere - Robotic Planes Chase After Climate Data.
For the first time, NASA has begun flying an unmanned aircraft outfitted with scientific instruments to observe the Earth's atmosphere in greater detail. The agency has partnered with Northrop Grumman to outfit three aircraft, called Global Hawks, which were given to NASA by the U.S. Air Force. Unlike manned aircraft equipped with Earth observation tools, the Global Hawks can fly for up to 30 hours and travel for longer distances and at high altitudes; they can also gather more precise data than satellites and can be stationed to monitor an area for extended periods of time.
"There are certain types of atmospheric and earth science data that we are missing, even though we have things like satellites, manned aircraft, and surface-based networks," says Robbie Hood, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Unmanned Aircraft Systems program. NOAA has formed an agreement with NASA to help construct the scientific instruments and guide the science missions for the Global Hawks. Hood will evaluate the aircraft to determine how they could be best used. For example, she says, they could fly over a hurricane to monitor its intensity changes or fly over the arctic to monitor sea ice changes in higher detail.
The Global Hawks' first mission launched last week--an aircraft flew from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California over the Pacific Ocean. The project scientists will launch approximately one flight a week until the end of April. The drone is outfitted with 11 different instruments to take measurements and map aerosols and gases in the atmosphere, profile clouds, and gather meteorological data such as temperatures, winds, and pressures. It also has high-definition cameras to image the ocean colors.
"The first mission is mostly a demonstration mission to prove the capabilities of the system," says Paul Newman, co-project scientist and an atmospheric physicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. The aircraft will also fly under the Aura Satellite, a NASA satellite currently studying the Earth's ozone, air quality, and climate, to validate its measurements, making a comparison between its readings and what the new aircraft can do. "Satellites give you global coverage every day, but they can't see a region very precisely. The aircraft can give you regular observations and very fine resolution," says Newman.
The robotic airplanes operate completely autonomously--scientists program the plane prior to departure with the intended destinations, and the plane navigates itself. However, scientists can change the aircraft's flight path once in route or remotely pilot it in an emergency. Because a Global Hawk flight can last 30 hours (compared to 12 hours for a manned flight), the aircraft can travel to regions, such as the arctic, that are typically too dangerous for manned missions.
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by Big Gav
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monitoring,
wind power
Renewable Energy World has an article on some new technology for optimising wind turbine output by monitoring what is happening upwind in terms of wind gust direction - Eye on the Wind: Innovations Designed to "See" and Track Gusts.
High-technology company Catch the Wind is commercialising a nacelle-mounted, forward-looking system capable of sensing both wind speed and direction, as well as rapid wind variations. In December 2009, the company released striking trial test results for the innovative lightweight technology, claimed as unique and named the Vindicator Laser Wind Sensor (LWS).
Virginia-based Catch the Wind is a spin-off of US-based Optical Air Data Systems (OADS). The latter, founded in 1990 near Washington DC, is a leader in fibre-opticpulsed Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging) systems, an optical remote sensing technology.
Building upon 19 years of aerospace research know-how and experience, Catch the Wind, which was founded in September 2008, acquired a technology license from OADS for all its commercial (non-aviation) applications. The Vindicator LWS uses advanced laser technology combined with Doppler radar techniques to analyze air particle movement and determine wind speed and direction. The use of Vindicator LWS is primarily intended for improving the performance of wind turbines, resulting in higher energy production and reduced lifetime maintenance costs. ...
A key finding of the Nebraska trial was that employing a Vindicator on a given wind turbine increases energy yield by 12.3% on average, says Rogers. That positive result in turn can be attributed to both optimized rotor alignment with the oncoming wind, and increased gust detection. He stresses that the increased output was achieved while the Vindicator controlled the turbine for only 56% of the time as specified by the 30-day trial parameters.
‘Excluding statistically insufficient measurement data, the Vindicator improved energy output by more than 18%. The system is also insensitive to specific environmental conditions’, adds Rogers, expanding on the positive trial results.
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bill gross,
csp,
esolar,
monitoring,
software,
solar thermal power
Todd Woody (who seems to be writing for half the green business periodicals in the US) has an interview with (solar thermal power company) eSolar CEO Bill Gross at Yale Environment 360 - A High-Tech Entrepreneur On the Front Lines of Solar. Gross talks about how techniques from the software industry are being applied to continuously improve the performance of next generation CSP plants, how the Chinese market is moving much faster than that in the US, how eSolar tries to build smaller plants on private land close to cities to avoid the transmission bottlenecks plaguing remote locations currently and what is needed to make CSP cost competitive with coal fired power.
Bill Gross is not your typical solar energy entrepreneur. In a business dominated by Silicon Valley technologists and veterans of the fossil fuel industry, Gross is a Southern Californian who made his name in software. His Idealab startup incubator led to the creation of companies such as eToys, CitySearch, and GoTo.com. The latter pioneered search advertising — think Google — and was acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003.
That payday has allowed Gross to pursue his green dreams. (As a teenager, he started a company to sell plans for a parabolic solar dish he had designed.) Over the past decade, Gross has launched a slew of green tech startups, including solar power plant builder eSolar, electric car company Aptera, and Energy Innovations, which is developing advanced photovoltaic technology.
But it has been eSolar, backed by Google and other investors, that has been Idealab’s brightest light. In January, the company signed one of the world’s largest green-energy deals when it agreed to provide the technology to build solar farms in China that would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity — at peak output the equivalent of two large nuclear power plants. And last week, eSolar licensed its technology to German industrial giant Ferrostaal to build solar power plants in Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. Those deals followed eSolar partnerships in India and the U.S.
ESolar’s power plants deploy thousands of mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun’s rays on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a slender tower. The heat creates steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. Last year, eSolar built its first project, a five-megawatt demonstration power plant, called Sierra, in the desert near Los Angeles.
This “power tower” technology is not new, but what sets the company apart is Gross’ use of sophisticated software and imaging technology to control the 176,000 mirrors that form a standard, 46-megawatt eSolar power plant. That computing firepower precisely positions the mirrors to create a virtual parabola that focuses the sun on the tower. That allows the company to place small, inexpensive mirrors close together, which dramatically reduces the land needed for the power plant and cuts manufacturing and installation costs. ...
e360: Were there any particular lessons you were able bring from the Internet industry to the solar industry?
Gross: The biggest lesson that we brought was — I don’t know if it was a lesson, but it was a philosophy — which is Internet-enable everything and put monitoring into everything.
So we have a microprocessor in every mirror and we have statistics second-by-second on the status, position, reliability, pointing accuracy — everything — of every single mirror. We structured ourselves almost like an Internet company from the beginning to have logs of everything — every revolution of the turbine, every control from the control room, every Web cam image captured — so we could do data mining and data analysis on everything.
We want the ability to make software upgrades and impact every power plant around the world. That’s probably one of the biggest differences between our technology and all other solar technology. If you [have] a big field of [photovoltaic] panels, those PV panels are there for 25 years. They’ll have that same performance, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.
We can make a software upgrade and every power plant in the world can suddenly put out 3 percent more power potentially. And we found already a number of software improvements that we can make even over the past six months, which significantly boosts performance of an already-constructed power plant. There’s new improvements we can make to the actual hardware, too, but even without changing the hardware there are software changes that can make more power, so we’re really excited about that. ...
e360: At a time when some big solar power plant projects are bogged down in disputes over their environmental impact on desert ecosystems and their water consumption, eSolar so far has avoided such controversies.
Gross: We have a strategy at eSolar to never impact pristine land. And the way we address that is several-fold. First, we have a higher output per acre, so we take a smaller footprint. Second, we’re economical at a smaller size. We can be fully economical at our 46-megawatt size. Those two things combined let us use a small enough footprint that we can locate on private land closer to population centers.
So rather than needing 2,000 acres contiguous to make the economics work — which you almost only can find far away on pristine land or [federal] land — we can locate on only 200 acres very close to a city and we can buy previously disturbed farmland or other properties that’s already been developed so we’re not causing any disturbance to natural habitat. And that’s an important part of our philosophy. It gives us an economic advantage because we’re locating closer to transmission. That’s probably even a bigger factor.
It takes years and years to build the transmission out to the pristine lands. [But] the power plant, for example, in Lancaster [California], is across the street from a transmission line. We didn’t have to build miles and miles of transmission, which takes years and years to get people to approve. ...
e360: Where do you see the next big innovations in solar thermal technology coming from?
Gross: I feel we still need to get almost another factor of two in the reduction of energy costs to potentially compete with coal. We’re already close to competing with natural gas. It depends on the sunshine and the region. Another factor of two is going to require two things to make that happen: Approximately 25 percent of that can be gotten by adding [energy] storage, and 25 percent can be gotten by increasing efficiency and lowering costs by volume production.
We produced 500 mirrors two years ago, 24,000 last year, and this year we’ll produce a million. So we’re going to get a quantity break just by going to a million mirrors from 24,000.
And everything gets more efficient in the supply chains as you get up to those volumes. Anything that we buy in our lives that has dramatic cost reduction has seen a million — a million cars, or a million iPhones, or a million laptops. So far there’s only been thousands of heliostats. So finally this year we’ll cross the million number and that’s when we can get the price reduction to really be competitive with fossil fuels.
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environment,
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monitoring
Transmaterial has a post on self-powered water quality monitors that can be deployed in rivers - Responsive Archipelago.
Developed by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, River Glow is a system of floating pods that monitors water quality and displays a variable light signal that is visible from the water or onshore. Each unit consists of an underwater pH probe, super bright LEDs, uncoated fiber-optic strands, and photovoltaics that provide power to rechargeable batteries. When deployed in public waterways, the system creates an ethereal cloud of light hovering above the water’s surface that changes colors according to the condition of the water.
The system is energy self-sufficient, low-cost, modular, and easy to deploy, offering an alternative to expensive and time-consuming testing of water samples in a remote research laboratory. The component system allows for swapping of alternative energy-harvesting devices, water-quality sensors, and low-energy lighting or actuators.
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ecology,
forests,
monitoring,
science
Science Daily has an interesting article on the way plants produce aspirin like chemicals to combat stress - often in response to forewarnings from other plants - Plants In Forest Emit Aspirin Chemical To Deal With Stress; Discovery May Help Agriculture.
Plants in a forest respond to stress by producing significant amounts of a chemical form of aspirin, scientists have discovered. The finding, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), opens up new avenues of research into the behavior of plants and their impacts on air quality, and it also has the potential to give farmers an early warning signal about crops that are failing.
"Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury," says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl, who led the study. "Our measurements show that significant amounts of the chemical can be detected in the atmosphere as plants respond to drought, unseasonable temperatures, or other stresses."
For years, scientists have known that plants in a laboratory may produce methyl salicylate, which is a chemical form of acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin. But researchers had never before detected methyl salicylate in an ecosystem or verified that plants emit the chemical in significant quantities into the atmosphere. ...
Researchers had not previously thought to look for methyl salicylate in a forest, and the NCAR team found the chemical by accident. They set up specialized instruments last year in a walnut grove near Davis, California, to monitor plant emissions of certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These hydrocarbon compounds are important because they can combine with industrial emissions to affect pollution, and they can also influence local climate.
When the NCAR scientists reviewed their measurements, they found to their surprise that the emissions of VOCs included methyl salicylate. The levels of methyl salicylate emissions increased dramatically when the plants, which were already stressed by a local drought, experienced unseasonably cool nighttime temperatures followed by large daytime temperature increases. ...
Karl and his colleagues speculate that the methyl salicylate has two functions. One of these is to stimulate plants to begin a process known as systemic acquired resistance, which is analogous to an immune response in an animal. This helps a plant to both resist and recover from disease.
The methyl salicylate also may be a mechanism whereby a stressed plant communicates to neighboring plants, warning them of the threat. Researchers in laboratories have demonstrated that a plant may build up its defenses if it is linked in some way to another plant that is emitting the chemical. Now that the NCAR team has demonstrated that methyl salicylate can build up in the atmosphere above a stressed forest, scientists are speculating that plants may use the chemical to activate an ecosystem-wide immune response.
"These findings show tangible proof that plant-to-plant communication occurs on the ecosystem level," says NCAR scientist Alex Guenther, a co-author of the study. "It appears that plants have the ability to communicate through the atmosphere."

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energy efficiency,
mesh networks,
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I've long been enthusiastic about ways of monitoring our environment for useful purposes (as opposed to the vast amount of time and money spent creating over-the-top surveillance apparatus'). This article at Technology Review describes a new example of gathering data that can be useful in reducing energy use, even if it is just the small amount of fuel people wasting driving around in circles trying to find a parking spot - Find a Parking Space Online. One day, your GPS co-driver might start telling you where you can park as well as where to turn (and where to slow down).
This fall, San Francisco will implement the largest mesh network for monitoring parking to date. Around 6,000 wireless sensors from the San Francisco company Streetline will be fixed alongside as many parking spots, monitoring both parking availability and the volume and speed of passing traffic. The city hopes that displaying information from the sensors on Web maps, smart phones, and signs on the street will reduce the traffic and pollution caused by circling cars.
A mesh network differs from a typical wireless network in that there's no central transmitter: every node can transmit to every other node. Mesh networks have generally been used for environmental monitoring, or to grant wireless devices Internet access.
When sensor networks have been deployed roadside, it's usually been to monitor traffic, not parking. In urban areas, traffic-monitoring systems have been used for congestion pricing: during business hours in downtown London, for instance, the license plates of cars are photographed, and the drivers are sent a bill. Some parking garages also have signs that tell drivers where the available spaces are, but such systems generally rely on manual car counting, not sensors.
In San Francisco, however, clusters of plastic-encased, networked sensors are embedded in the surface of the street. The main sensor in the cluster, which is commonly used to detect cars, is a magnetic one, says Jim Reich, the vice president of engineering at Streetline. Magnetic sensors detect when a large metal object locally disrupts Earth's magnetic field. One challenge with magnetic sensors is avoiding false positives. "We rely on the magnetometer the most, but in order to fix errors, we use other types of sensors [that] give you much higher reliability," says Reich. He won't elaborate on the supporting sensors, but he says that the Streetline system has a high ninety percent accuracy in recognizing parked cars.
To relay information, the Streetline sensors use Dust Networks' SmartMesh system, a spinoff of the Smart Dust project at the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. Dust Networks CEO Joy Weiss says that SmartMesh networks are more than 99.99 percent reliable. SmartMesh and Streetline's technology combined gives the nodes an average lifespan of 10 years on only two AA batteries. "We were really the first ones able to build an entire network where every node in the network is able to run on batteries for years, and at the same time deliver very high reliability," says Weiss. "In most [other networks], these are a trade-off."
Dust Networks uses several techniques to combine efficiency and reliability. The first is redundant routing: if a signal doesn't go through the first time, the sending node tries other nearby nodes, or tries the same node after a period of time. A technique called channel hopping circumvents interference by assuming that changing channels every few seconds is more efficient than trying to find a good or bad channel, says Weiss. To save power, she adds, the nodes go to sleep in between transmissions.
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amee,
environment,
measurement,
monitoring
O'Reilly's ETech Conference in March has some interesting sessions on the agenda. One session which caught my eye is on AMEE - the “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”, which aims to measure the "carbon footprint of everything".
If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?
The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative to measure the energy profile of everything. As trillions of dollars flow into re-inventing how we consume, we have a unique opportunity to start with open data and open systems. AMEE is an open aggregation platform for energy and CO2 data, algorithms, and transactions. We aim to dramatically accelerate change, because we need to.
AMEE is a neutral aggregator of reliable carbon data, for use by commercial and noncommercial groups. Active users include the UK Government, Google, Morgan Stanley, and The Royal Society for the Arts. Developer API keys are available, and we’ll be showing some of the applications.