Building Your Own Ceiling Array

Hardware

The EmCee system is a collection of hardware and software that provides control an monitoring of deployed nodes through the use of a wired back channel.

Our initial implementation used mica motes with our own in house serial interface board that provided communication and power. The current generation (recommended option) uses mica2 motes and crossbow's MIB510 programing board which provides the additional benefit or allowing reprogramming the motes via the serial port.

Serial Port Multiplexer

Serial MUX info...

EmCee: The EmCee Software

EmStar extensions for EmCee...

EmView: The EmStar Visualizer

EmView is the modular, extensible...

Setup Instructions (the ugly details)

Hardware Requirements

• Interface Board

  • MIB510

  • rj45-db9 adaptor

• Cabling

  • Lots of pre-made Cat5 cables, or...

  • Spool of CAT5

  • RJ45 ends and cripmer

• MUX

  • digi 8, 16, 32 port

• Host PC

  • Must run FUSD

Software Configuration

• Serial Driver

  • digi driver

  • startup script

• Config File

  • Fields

• Hostmote

  • get

  • build

  • run

It's preferable to have a drop ceiling in which to route the serial cables and power for all of the motes. We use Cat5 cables as serial cables, with RJ45-to-DB9 converters on the mote end.

Once the hardware is all in place, select a computer as your ceiling controller. Run the software supplied by the vendor of the serial multiplexor on that computer. It should create N serial ports, e.g. /dev/ttyS00, one for each multiplexor port.

Next, create a configuration file that binds locations to motes. We keep ours in /etc, called /etc/node.info. Here is an example from Gamayun.

Start hostmoted in ceiling mode, and giving it the path to your configuration file: hostmoted -c /etc/node.info.

Cat /dev/mote/ceiling to see the status of your new array, If all is well, you should be able to run emcee, the same way you run emsim, to move from the world of simulation to emulation using a real communication channel.