One of the main issues when dealing when embedded systems -specially as an amateur developer- is understanding what happens since our board/tablet/phone/etc (we will refer to is as a device from now on) is powered on, until the OS takes control of the device and we are able to use it. Understanding this chain of events is crucial in order to develop low-level routines for any given embedded platform, and equally necessary for efficiently design high-level Apps.
Getting Started for Developing for/under Android – Setting up the System
One of the first things that needs to be done before starting developing for a specific platform, is setting up the system, which involves installing Developing Tools, SDKs, etc. Here we are going to describe how to set up a Linux Ubuntu from scratch in order to get started in Android development.
Developing for Android – Underneath Apps
Some weeks ago, I started working with Android, not as an application developer, but as a platform one. What does this means? Under any Android there is a great deal of things that need to work in order to be able to run whichever app we can think of – from a game to e-banking.
Wireless Sensor Network Testbed at ITU
In the Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) world, one of the still to be understood phenomena is power consumption. When dealing with small, low-power devices, running protocols that explodes this characteristics, understanding the way the energy is spent is crucial, specially when we want to optimize systems to their limit. As part of my Master’s Thesis, I have been working with TinyOS and the Telosb and Epic platforms, in order to help biologists and scientists to wirelessly gather data in High-Arctic environments (MANA project), and still now questions related to power consumption, energy harvesting or the impact of temperature in hardware behavior are still unclear to me and my group.
For the last couple of days, I have been working on an idea that we ourselves proposed as part of a Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) PhD course – Building up a Testbed in front of the IT University of Copenhagen, where we can test and monitor the hardware and software we expect to deploy in Arctic stations -such as Zackenberg(Greenland)- so that all the mistakes we are able to make at home, can be avoided when deploying the system.
This Testbed aims -at least now, in the beginning- to be non-hardware specific, being possible to contrast different platforms, protocols, and techniques when working under the same conditions. The first iteration is being developed with Arduino-based equipment, which is described below, and intends to be a base for future improvements and tests.
- Arduino UNO boards with ATMega328p MicroProcessor
- XBee Pro (2.4GHz) modules by Digi
- Dallas DS18B20 1-Wire Digital Thermometer
At the moment, only temperature is being monitored and transmitted to the base station (another Arduino UNO + XBee Pro), nonetheless, counting on the infrastructure, we can easily start building on top of it, keeping current measurements as meta-data when including more sophisticated sensors for water quality monitoring, cloud covering, light, etc.
This is an easy start, and hopefully the beginning of a real infrastructure for WSN experiments 🙂
– javier
Still under construction… but alive :)
My Cellar Door is still an under-construction website. I’m trying to spend some daily-time to update and fill it up with my projects, interesting links, tools, frameworks, tips, etc – hope you come back soon 😉
Please feel free to check out the AboutMe section to have an idea of who I am, what I do, and contact me if you feel like doing it 🙂
Best
–javier
My Cellar Door 
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