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Wireless Temperature Sensor Network?

Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 8:03 pm
by loo_hoo_ser
I want this!!

http://www.pointsix.com/cgi-bin/PointSi ... ointSensor

How do I get this stuff? It doesn't look like its sold to customers in residential markets. I'd love to have an array of wireless sensors like this around the house and have it communicate the temperatures to HB without wires!

The interface on the receiver is RS-232 so it'd be a snap for HB to talk to it.

Anyone here done something like this? I've heard of wired but that's the rub - I don't want to run wires everywhere to the temperature collector unit.

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 7:10 am
by Richard Naninck
If you can get these sensors, getting them to work should be easy. I have built my own wireless network including temp sensors, but these sensors are part of some more wireless IO. I guess it would be too expensive if my system only did temperature.
I almost can't believe the battery life they put in their specs.
Seems like a nice set, but with such a battery life, I don't think the Tx part will be very strong thus limiting the range!

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:20 pm
by loo_hoo_ser
What did you use for the wireless temperature sensing network? Where did you get it from?

I don't see why a wireless network couldn't have a long battery life - my alarm system has wireless components and the battery in those sensors have been still working for the last 3 years since I got the system. So that's pretty good.

So if I could do the same thing with the temperature sensors, I'd put them in various locations. I'm not too worried about the HB integration but how to get my hands on such a network. The web site I found appeared to be geared towards industrial customers and OEM manufacturers. So, how do I get one of these? I don't want to pay through the nose either.

Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 3:24 pm
by Richard Naninck
loo_hoo_ser wrote:What did you use for the wireless temperature sensing network? Where did you get it from?
http://www.cebotics.com/phpbb2/viewtopi ... ht=#429156

Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 8:14 pm
by loo_hoo_ser
Richard -

I checked out your post regarding your temperature sensing network. Very impressive - all homebrewed! However, I'm not sure what part of your sensing network is wireless? It appears that your temperature sensors connect to a microcontroller to obtain the temperature data. Are all your microcontrollers sending temperature data through a wireless (RF) interface to the HB server?

The reason why I liked the PointSix solution is that each of the temperature sensors is a self contained unit - it communicates with a distant RF receiver module which has a RS-232 interface. By tracking the unique serial numbers that comes back from each temperature sensor, its possible to map the temperature values to separate values that the receiver reports, etc.

I was hoping to avoid the homebrew path and thought it would be time to find something a little more integrated.

Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 1:35 am
by Richard Naninck
At the time of that posting, the sensors were still wired, but now they are wireless through 868MHz Narrowband RF.
You should probably go for of the shelf solutions since my setup requires lots of work. I just combined some of my IO in a wireless design and made the temp sensor part of it. Very custom made so to speak.