SimpleLink Sensor Tag

This can be powered with a coin battery for a year and packs 10 sensors on one small form factor. The sensors for this project that I will be focusing on include:

• IR Thermopile Temp Sensor (TMP007)

Uses sensitythermopite to measure the infrared energy being emitter from the surface of objects.

• Humidity Sensor (HDC1000)

A high accuracy digital Humiditysensor with a temperature sensor.

• Altimeter Pressure (BMP280)

Applications for barometric pressure sensors include weather monitoring, elevator / stair case detection, drop detection or indoor-navigation

• Ambient Light Sensor (OPT3001)

One can think of luminous flux as a measure of the total "amount" of visible light present. A given amount of light will illuminate a surface more dimly if it is spread over a larger area, so illuminance (lux) is inversely proportional to area when the luminous flux (lumens) is held constant. Measurement can detect if there is a full moon on a clear night, direct sunlight or a very dark overcast day.

One challenge was to upload the BLE sensor tag on my Blackberry Z10. I was able to find a SDK to install and with the version of Android on the phone there are a few limitations.

Xbee and ZigBee

1 XBee Explorer Dongle

2 XBee modules Series 1

These are the simplest and apparently plug and play. This is the very popular 2.4GHz XBee module from Digi. These modules take the 802.15.4 stack (the basis for Zigbee) and wrap it into a simple to use serial command set. These modules allow a very reliable and simple communication between microcontrollers, computers, systems, really anything with a serial port! Point to point and multi-point networks are supported. I am hoping to receive these soon.

Sensor Data to Cloud

I am leaning towards IBM IoT Foundation service. I created a free account with IBM for BlueMix. The possibilities of creating thresholds to send alerts are limitless. Below is my first test setup using Node-RED.