Wireless sensor data acquisition on remote locations
Mark Apat · 2010
Systems for remote wireless acquisition of sensor data are an important field of technology which combines knowledge from computer science and electronics. Development of such systems is facilitated by wireless standards like ZigBee which improve and simplify such a development. This diploma thesis describes the design and realization of a ZigBee standard based system and the corresponding application for data acquisition and control of remote sensors. The system is capable of acquiring various data about environment, wirelessly transferring them to a different location and displaying them on a screen. It is physically divided into two electrical circuits or modules, which perform individual system operations. They are the transmitting and the receiving module, each of them containing an AVR series microcontroller. The next chapters contain the description of the software that was developed for this system. Transmitting and receiving modules use separate programs that control the circuits of the modules. These programs are responsible for measuring the temperature, relative humidity, light intensity, acquisition of time and date, and also for management of errors in data acquisition and in the bidirectional communication between the modules. The thesis ends with a description of the system's practical operation. Its application is presented on an example case. In the conclusion the system is assessed against the starting requirements and several possible improvements and possibilities for system upgrades are given. The purpose of the thesis was to design an energy efficient system for simple data acquisition and their presentation over a wireless link to a remote LCD screen. The thesis contains an integration of a flexible, low cost, energy efficient system with a wireless transfer of various sensor data which is simple to produce.