Last Wednesday the 11th of November 2009 De Eerste Nationale Dag van de Zelforganisatie, a seminar dedicated to the topic of selforganization, was held in Rotterdam. An excellent occasion for Almende to show what can be done with a Wireless Sensor Network, and so a lot of effort was put into creating an operational Tracking Application. The application was used on the conference to track a number of visitors as they moved through the area. It consisted of a number of static nodes that were spread through the conference area and of which the location was recorded, and a number of mobile nodes that were handed out to selected visitors. While no further functionality was added, a little creativity goes a long way: the organizer could use it to alert people when workgroups start, visitors could use it to look up where certain other visitors are during the lunch break to go talk to them, etc.



As can be seen in the picture, getting the application together was not straightforward, as a lot of different processes and devices are involved. First, the actual tracking data is produced by the network of nodes, and needs to be gathered by the two sniffer nodes that were present. This raw data was stored in a database, where the locations of the static nodes were also stored. Then, there was an application that took the raw tracking data, along with the locations of the static nodes from the database, and generated from this the locations of all mobile nodes present in the environment. These mobile node locations were again stored in the database. Finally, there was a googleApp that took the locations of both the static and the mobile nodes from the database and generated an image of the conference area with blue icons for the static nodes and red icons for the red nodes. This image could be refreshed every minute.

The graphical user interface that was developed can be viewed on http://1.latest.almendetracker.appspot.com/, but beware that as it is still in a developmental stage, it is quite slow.

Here are pictures of the MyriaNodes before and after deployment. Though they do not look very inconspicuous, most visitors of the seminar did not notice them until they were explicitly pointed out to people.