Report on visit to Sensors Expo

O'Reilly editor Jonathan Gennick just sent to our editors list a brief report on his visit to the Sensors Expo in Chicago. It's not clear how to attack this market from a publishing point of view yet, other than in the pages of Make, but it's clear that sensors are going to revolutionize our world, so it's an area that is very much on our radar. Here are excerpts from Jonathan's report:

I dropped down to Chicago yesterday to the Sensors Expo, to meet with several people who are developing products around the new wireless protocol known as ZigBee. Below is a summary of some of what I learned. I've tried to organize it somewhat.
 

Status of the technology: chip companies (Freescale, Ember, etc.) are rolling out ZigBee chips and modules, and also developer kits. These companies sell into OEMS, which are also rolling out products. The emphasis at the Sensors Expo was on wireless sensing and control (mostly on sensing). Some consumer products are out and will be out soon. Control4 has a product suite targeted at home users. Eaton is planning to roll out devices targeted at the residential market in time for the Christmas buying season (my source for that is not Eaton themselves, but I believe the developer I talked with knows what he's talking about)

Consumers will likely never see the word ZigBee. Control4 and Eaton are pushing their own product lines. ZigBee just happens to be the underlying wireless technology they are using. They don't (currently) promote that underlying technology to consumers, nor do they plan for their respective products to interact. For example, do not plan on buying Eaton's basement-floor water-sensor and connecting it to Control4's home control software.

The "magic" in ZigBee is not so much in the wireless technology, but rather in the sensors and control units. You have to know what sort of sensors are available in order to do magic w/ZigBee, and, at that point, you probably care more about what the sensor can do than about what ZigBee can do.

One of the coolest demos, if not the coolest, involved a three-axis accelerometer just introduced by Freestyle. The accelerometer is a chip the size of your little fingernail. It's small. They had it wired (via serial port) into a computer and you could scroll up and down a menu pick-list just by tilting the sensor up and down. My first thought was that someone needs to write a mouse-driver for that, and use ZigBee as the interface. Imagine a ring on your finger that lets you navigate up/down/left/right on your screen just by pointing in those directions. It seems completely feasible.

I can second Jonathan on that. The coolest thing that I saw at the D conference was Hillcrest Labs' demo of a TV remote control (and associated software for controlling interactive TV) that uses just such a sensor to create what is effectively a 3D-mouse. Imagine a TV remote with only two buttons, and a system that allows you to navigate through a zoomable surface to get at anything. Very cool.

Jonathan continued:

Freestyle also has a sensor that can detect objects (your finger again) within a three dimensional electric field. Imagine being able to point to the window *behind* the one you are viewing, in order to select it and bring it to the front. No one had *that* as a demo, but it's an interesting thought, isn't it?

...[One guy I met} has got plans to install ZigBee based sensors on some canyon trails in Arizona (where he lives) and have them connect to hilltop repeaters that will send a one-watt signal across the 40 miles or so to his house. He wants to monitor trail usage. Mostly, it's a way for him to do something hands-on with the technology.

...One app [another contact] told me about (that I may have mentioned previously) is a border-crossing monitoring solution. There's actually a station somewhere in Arizona where "they" (not sure who "they" is) research ways to monitor borders between countries. ZigBee-based devices get dropped every few feet, with stronger transmitters every mile or so, and all the data gets collected and rolled up into some central database. Using a combination of metal-sensors, vibration sensors, listening devices, and I forget the fourth, he can detect the difference between a human, a car, a deer, and so forth.

...[Another fellow I talked to] is involved with a military sensing operation that expects to log one terabyte of data per hour(!) That's a fair bit of incoming data. And, sadly, that's all he could tell me about it. It goes to show that people are developing and deploying sensor networks that use many, many devices to collect very large amounts of detailed data.

... A company called Raymarine has ZigBee-based depth-finders for use on fishing vessels. The main depth-finder uses ZigBee to communicate with little, clip-on-your-belt display modules that you can cary about the ship with you.

...One [sensor] that I saw used the change in capacitance to measure the change in distance across an air-gap, to measure how much I could sqeeze a curved, metal bar together. I forget how much I could squeeze, but the sensor was measuring to the millionth of an inch.

Jonathan's last words sum it up: "Cool stuff."