We had a lot of fun last week at the IPSO Alliance Interop event that I co-chaired.  There were a dozen of us in Santa Clara, and several more in France and Norway.  Altogether we had six hardware platforms running a collection of operating systems and a couple of different PHY/MAC combinations, all talking amongst themselves using IP/UDP packets.  The high point for me was seeing four hardware platforms from three vendors all synchronizing their communications using the

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I'm happy to announce that Dust Networks is included in the 2012 CW 100.  Chosen by the editors of Connected World magazine, the CW 100 represents the top companies that are “demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in connectivity.”

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Just back from Remote 2011, where I presented along-side Gregory Ratcliff, the Director of Professional Service Operations for the Liebert Services division of Emerson Network Power.  Together we described Liebert’s Remote Monitoring Network program and the underlying and enabling Dust Networks SmartMesh technology.   As Greg said in the program notes, “The teams capturing this data were NOT RF engineers and the simplicity of setup and absolute reliability of the system was a key requirement.  In other words, deploying an RF mesh network telemetry system can be simple an

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Check out this great video, by Emerson Process Control, of their Dust Networks-enabled SmartWireless system working in the harshest environments.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzRNzHqFzY

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That’s the opening line of the ‘soapbox speech’ we’ve been making for a long while at Dust Networks. ‘Sensors everywhere’ is a self explanatory evocation of the internet-of-things, but what underpins its realization? There are some very basic wireless enablers that make the vision a reality:

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Check out this Network World article by Dave Evans, Cisco's chief futurist and chief technologist for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. His No. 1 pick for the “10 technologies that will change the world in the next 10 years”? “The Internet-of-things”, and he cites sensor networks based on 6LoWPAN and ZigBee. Read it here: http://bit.ly/pjmJSB

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I’m just back from the IDTechEx Wireless Sensor Networking show in Munich. While we were honored to receive the award for the Best Technology Development of WSN/RTLS, the higher honor was to see several of our customers there, boasting of their accomplishments in delivering solutions that are driving efficiencies and savings across a variety of end user applications.

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I turned a light on using my cell phone the other day, and helped to create a revolution in wireless sensor networks. Sending a packet from your cell phone to a light may not seem like much, but this packet was an internet protocol (IP) packet, the same kind of packet that has made email and search engines work for decades, the same kind of packet that made Cisco and Google and Facebook the giants they are today, the same kind of packet that revolutionized our lives.

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Since I started working on wireless sensor networks in the late 90s, we’ve dropped the power consumption by four or five orders of magnitude. In the DARPA-sponsored Smart Dust program, we built little boards with cordless phone radios and 8-bit microprocessors on them. We showed that you could do multi-hop routing between nodes, or “motes” as we called them, in honor of our dusty roots. The motes were always listening to see if their neighbors had something to say, they burned about 100mW, and our AA battery-powered nodes lasted about two weeks.

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