Eliminate the Wires, Simplify Installations

Eliminating wiring makes it easier and, in some cases, possible to address a broad range of embedded monitoring applications such as environmental monitoring, power monitoring, structural health monitoring, and machine condition monitoring. For National Instruments customers such as the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), which needed to collect environmental data from the rain forest, eliminating wire not only reduced costs but also simplified installation challenges. Instead of running power lines and then hauling wire, networking infrastructure, and measurement systems deep into the rain forest, CENS scientists installed a wireless sensor node, batteries, solar panels, and a cellular modem to collect data over the Internet.  They use Google Maps to map node location and document deployment locations.

The University of Texas Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory is addressing the problem of monitoring and assessing the condition of bridges. In the case of bridge monitoring, the ability to deploy a wireless system without the overhead of wiring installation allows researchers to reuse hardware from bridge to bridge, which reduces the total hardware costs for measuring bridges that taxpayers fund. The removal of wires also addresses the challenge of vandalism where wires are intentionally cut.

New Technologies, New Applications

Wireless technology works well for many new applications from product design to embedded monitoring. National Instruments wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable new applications and can improve existing ones. Some possible application examples include distributed measurements along a windmill where the rotating blades and scale of the structures make wiring prohibitive. In another application example, airplane design, the weight of the wiring becomes a significant factor in changing the airplane dynamics and response.

In the area of industrial monitoring, wireless technology presents a new opportunity. What if every piece of critical equipment in a plant provided health data over a wireless network to a central database and then algorithms calculated the time to failure and alerted operators via e-mail or SMS messages? The potential impact on plant uptime and equipment reliability could change the market for equipment manufacturers. If the database were standardized, equipment manufacturers could install the wireless sensor hardware and provide algorithms for time-to-failure analysis, thereby reducing maintenance costs for their customers and increasing the value of their products.

Figure . Application Areas for Embedded Wireless Monitoring

The third generation of wireless adoption currently under way will deliver new technologies that engineers and scientists can use to address new applications and improve existing solutions. To compare the different wireless technologies you can choose from today, read the selecting right wireless Technology white paper about Wi-Fi and ZigBee.