Wireless Sensor Networks - Another Giant Leap:

Certainly one of the most outstanding achievements of the 20th century was the landing of a human on the Moon on July 22, 1969. Vast amounts of computational power in the form of mainframes and minicomputers performed essential mission-planning calculations on the ground before, during, and after the trip. A most critical piece of the computational equipment was a 70-lb Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) that performed real-time guidance and control. The AGC was significant for its tight coupling of human and machine, its early use of integrated circuits, and its reliable, mission critical software. The Apollo Guidance Computer was designed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.) and manufactured by Raytheon Corporation. The AGC was likely the most advanced computer at that time. Its core had a 2 megahertz clock and could access 74,000 bytes of memory.

Nowadays, the AGC has only a fraction of the computational power of the tiny microcontroller we used in the design of our data collection network. The microcontroller developed by Intel Research and named Intel® Mote is based on Zeevo’s integrated TC2001 System-On-Chip (SoC). It contains a 12MHz ARM CPU core, 64kB of SRAM, 512kB of FLASH and a class 2 CMOS Bluetooth radio and it packs in a small footprint of 2.5x2.5 inches. Tiny microcontrollers for embedded applications have been around for a while but they have typically lived in isolation, each working independantly. The real power of such devices has only been realized recently by interconnecting them using radio communication.

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