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Crossbow Aims at Easing Sensor Network Development Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox
Posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:11:00 PM |
Seeking to make it easier for suppliers of industrial automation and asset management systems to build wireless sensor networking technologies into their products, Crossbow Technology Inc. today released a series of pre-configured wireless sensor networking kits.
The kits, which include different combinations of wireless sensor nodes, radio/processor modules, USB programming pods, data acquisition boards, firmware, and PC interface software, target a variety of potential users. These include small and large industrial automation and asset management OEMs as well as educators building courses around wireless sensor networking technologies.
The move represents an attempt to significantly expand the market for wireless sensor network technology, according to John Suh, product manager at Crossbow.
"We want to make it easier for customers to experience sensor networks by giving them technology that they can use out of the box," Suh told Managing Automation. To data, he said "they haven't had devices packaged up in enclosures that could be placed anywhere. They had to deal with PC board, and that may have intimidated a lot of people."
Analysts today called the Crossbow announcement a smart move. "There's been a need for packaging of these sensor networking technologies together in a way that makes them easier to use," said Harry Forbes, senior analyst at ARC Research, in an interview with Managing Automation. "Today it's challenging for OEMs to keep track of the number of parts that they need to evaluate and test in order to build a sensor network."
Crossbow announced four different pre-packed sensor networking kits ranging in price from $795 to over $10,000. At the entry level, the WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) Starter Kit and the WSN Professional Kit are suitable for smaller OEMs. Each includes sensor nodes; a USB station for connecting a wireless sensor network with a PC or the Internet; firmware; and visualization software. The Professional Kit also includes data acquisition and programming boards.
One step up is the WSN OEM Design Kit for larger OEMs, Suh said. In addition to the elements included in the Starter and Professional kits, the OEM Design Kit has more wireless sensor nodes, an Ethernet base station, radio/processor modules, and an OEM module socket programmer. It lists for $5,000.
A fourth kit, the WSN Classroom Kit, lists for over $10,000.
The Crossbow kits are just the latest attempt by a wireless sensor networking technology provider to speed deployment of the technology by OEMs. Last November, Crossbow competitor Dust Networks introduced the SmartMesh-XD MOC, which places radio technology and mote functionality on a single chip.
Last May, Crossbow announced a partnership with Honeywell's Sensing and Control division to integrate Crossbow's wireless network interfaces, gateways, and components with Honeywell's sensor products.
Besides Honeywell, Crossbow's OEM customers include LifeFitness, a maker of fitness equipment that uses the equipment for asset management, and energy giant BP, which uses it for condition monitoring.
Also today, Crossbow announced plans to ship its first wireless sensor networking mote that incorporates a faster 32-bit processor. The Imote2 combines Intel's PXA271 32-bit XScale processor with a 2.4 GHz antenna and 802.15.4 standard radio technology. The faster mote, which Suh said will be available by the end of March, is designed for applications such as vibration analysis where it makes sense to do more data processing at the local mote level rather than transferring large amounts of data over the network for remote processing.
"With this announcement, Crossbow seems to be targeting higher-end applications that need more local compute power," said ARC's Forbes. "This would be useful for applications such as condition monitoring."
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