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)

Battery power

Even though it sounds simple, making your Arduino battery-powered is a complicated subject. There are a lot of different types of batteries and multiple ways to connect them, each with their own requirements and effects on the power that is used.

This section gives you a very concise summary of the battery terminology, intended to be exactly enough to make sense of the rest of this chapter. For more detailed information about the batteries and an overview of some common types that are available, see https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-batteries.

Batteries are devices that store energy and can be used to power electrical devices. Every battery has a nominal voltage (such as 1.5V for alkaline batteries), indicating an average voltage of the battery over its entire lifetime.

Battery capacity is measured in mAh, or milliampere-hour. A battery of 1,000 mAh can supply 1,000 mA for 1 hour, 100 mA for 10 hours, 10 mA for 100 hours, and so on. To estimate the lifetime of a battery,...