Kenya elephants text rangers

Elephants in Kenya are sending text messages to warn wildlife rangers that they are heading for the crops of neighbouring villages. more

Mobile environmental monitoring

Goes both ways: In London you can receive air quality info by SMS. Or sensors embedded in mobiles can detect and send radiation or pollen levels. "Grassroots citizen science" work by Eric Paulos in Ghana attached sensors to taxi drivers' phones in Ghana to measure pollution levels. Details here.

See also Urban sensing: Out of the woods: "Services such as Google Earth have driven to nearly zero the cost of this visualization measured in terms of dollars, time-to-deploy, and technical sophistication required." (See an example of the scientific use of Google Earth here.)

Microscope Enables Disease Diagnosis with a Cell Phone

A research team at UC Berkeley is developing a technology that will enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to diagnose malaria with just a cell phone and a special microscope. more

Botanicalls

A soil moisture sensor in each plant sends information to an Arduino board which then passes the information to a ZigBee network. An XPort is used to send data via PHP to a mySQL database and to Asterisk, which drives the phone calls.

The code on the chip averages the data and makes decisions about when a phone call request should be sent. There are set thresholds, unique to each plant, for minimum and maximum soil moisture.

The moisture sensor circuit is based on Forrest Mims. Read more here.

Precision Agriculture

NASA initiative extols the benefits of remote sensing, mapping, satellite imagery for improving crop yields, reducing fertilizer use, keeping records, increasing profits, reducing pollution.

Data to audio

Given the prominence of radio, and literacy levels, in the communities we're working with, this article may be of interest. Listen to your crops grow?

Sensor network companies

Arch Rock
Crossbow
Dust Networks
Ember
Microstrain
Millenial Net
Moteiv
Ranch Systems - agricultural monitoring (primarily to vinyards). Monitor wind, water, soil temp to manage frost, disease, pests
Riga Development
Sensicast
Tranzeo

Source: Economist special report on wireless telecoms: A world of connections, 28 Apr 07.

Arduino

Arduino is an inexpensive and open source hardware prototyping environment. It can take input from any number of sensors, and output to devices, actuators, computers, etc.

A new Bluetooth module is just out - this is Class 1 Bluetooth, with range of about 100 meters (versus 10m for normal Bluetooth). Up to 7 devices can connect via Bluetooth; this can be extended with one of several hacks such as a 'scatternet' in which one device bridges two networks; or by automatically connecting and disconnecting.

Telit makes a GSM modem module which provides onboard mobile telephony. With an audio chip it could make phone calls; it has a microphone input. So effectively you could build your own mobile phone if you want to. It can also do SMS, email and FTP, has an embedded TCP/IP stack, and Python interpreter.

Arduino is also working on an embedded web server on the board, so you can check and set inputs and outputs to a remote module from a web page.

A ZigBee module is also under development.

Pure Data is a free and open source visual programming environment (like Max/MSP) for which a graphical Arduino programmer has been written.

sensors -> mobile phone

Mobile phone network looks like the best communication option for sending/receiving data in a remote location. This page describes interfacing a microcontroller with a Nokia phone. A challenge, however, would be keeping a battery charged via solar panel. Power requirements for the microcontroller/sensors will be low (~5V) and may be able to run off of the same panel used by the phone; microcontrollers can usually withstand up to 12VDC. Heat of course would be an issue...

Computers & Electronics in Agriculture

Current TOP25 articles within the journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture from Science Direct

Environmental XML

described here, "enabling people to tag and share remote realtime environmental data." I have met Usman Haque who developed this, and he is located in London, in case we would like to contact him.

Automated Data Collection in Western Kenya

From the CODATA 2002: Frontiers of Scientific and Technical Data conference

A presentation about field data collection for an anti-malaria project in Western Kenya using GPS, pda and solar powered battery chargers (for more...).

And another about "The Role of IT and Data Management in Expansion and Change at a Remote Research Unit in Kenya".

CODATA is the International Council for Science : Committee on Data for Science and Technology

Wireless sensors in agriculture and food industry...

Just a link to a review paper I found useful in getting an overview of possible uses of sensors in agriculture.

Wireless sensors in agriculture and food industry—Recent development and future perspective. Ning Wanga, Naiqian Zhangb and Maohua Wangc.

Abstract: This paper presents an overview on recent development of wireless sensor technologies and standards for wireless communications as applied to wireless sensors. Examples of wireless sensors and sensor networks applied in agriculture and food production for environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, M2M-based machine and process control, building and facility automation and RFID-based traceability systems are given. The paper also discusses advantages of wireless sensors and obstacles that prevent their fast adoption. Finally, based on an analysis of market growth, the paper discusses future trend of wireless sensor technology development in agriculture and food industry.

Available from Computers & Electronics in Agriculture