Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By : Matthijs Kooijman
Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By: Matthijs Kooijman

Overview of this book

Arduino has been established as the de facto standard microcontroller programming platform, being used for one-off do-it-yourself projects as well as prototypes for actual products. By providing a myriad of libraries, the Arduino community has made it very easy to interact with pretty much any piece of hardware out there. XBee offers a great range of low-power wireless solutions that are easy to work with, by taking all of the complexity of wireless (mesh) networking out of your hands and letting you focus on what to send without worrying about the how. Building wireless sensor networks is cost-effective as well as efficient as it will be done with Arduino support. The book starts with a brief introduction to various wireless protocols, concepts, and the XBee hardware that enables their use. Then the book expands to explain the Arduino boards to you, letting them read and send sensor data, collect that data centrally, and then even control your home from the Internet. Moving further more advanced topics such as interacting through the standard Zigbee Home Automation protocol, or making your application power-efficient are covered. By the end of the book, you will have all the tools needed to build complete, real-world solutions.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Storing your data in the cloud

When it comes to storing your data somewhere online, there are literally dozens of online platforms that offer some kind of data storage service aimed at collecting sensor data. Each of these has different features, complexity, and cost, and you are encouraged to have a look around at what is available.

Even though a lot of platforms are available, almost none of them are really suited for a hobby sensor network such as the one presented in this book. Most platforms support the basic collection of data and offer a Web API to access the data, but there were two requirements that ruled out most of the platforms:

  1. It has to be affordable for a home user with just a bit of data. Ideally, there is a free version to get started.
  2. It has to support creating a dashboard that can show data and graphs, but can also show input elements that can be used to talk back to the network (this will be used in the next chapter to create an online thermostat).

When this book was written...