Smart Greenhouse

The purpose of this project is to collaborate with Petaluma Bounty Farm in Petaluma, CA. The farm's mission is to grow healthy food for everyone through collaboration, education and promoting self-reliance. The purpose of this project is to explore the possibility of upgrading the existing greenhouse at Petaluma Bounty Farm to a Smart greenhouse, a self regulating, micro-climate controlled environment for optimal plant growth.

Team Lead: Alexander Sneed, Nathan Candler, Andres Rivera and Rania Saba
Status: Expected to be completed by December 2020
Funded by: None

AirQulity Station

An estimated 4.5 billion people are currently exposed to particulate matter (PM) levels at least twice the concentration that the WHO considers safe. Existing evidence linking health to air pollution is largely based on populations exposed to only modest levels of PM and almost entirely composed of observational studies, which are likely to confound air pollution with other unobserved determinants of health. The purpose of this project is to design a low-cost air quality station for the city of Rohnert Park. 

Status: Expected to be completed by September 2018 (ongoing)

Funded by: Sonoma State SOURCE Award. 

More Information: See the web page

Battery-less Fire Sensor

Forest fires are one of the most important and prevalent type of disasters and they can create great environmental problems for Nature. It is known that they are detectable and easily preventable. When a wildfire burns out of control, the size of the losses can be almost immeasurable. The cost of such disaster may be millions of trees, in addition to losses of structures, animals (wild and farm), and human life. Automated early fire detection systems have recently received a significant amount of attention due to their importance in protecting the global environment. The purpose of this project us is to explore the design of a battery wild-fire sensor. The sensor uses a power harvesting technology to power up and transmit temperature data. 

Status: Expected to be completed by December 2018 (ongoing)

Funded by: Sonoma County Water Agency through the Waters Collaborative

More Information: Later

SenCell - Cellular-enabled Environmental Sensor Network

The objective of this project is to design a solar powered, cellular enabled, and modular system that can monitor conditions of its surrounding environment and relay that data to an end user. This system will consist of two basic nodes: (1) a sensory node that is placed into the field to gather data and (2) an internet enabled central server which collects sensor data from the sensory nodes for the user. The sensory nodes will communicate with the server using the GSM/GPRS cellular network. Using a PIC microcontroller and a GSM/GPRS modem, the sensory node will have the ability to send collected information to the remote server for analysis by the end user. Data will be made available to the user in the form of a comma separated value (CSV) file, containing both time-stamps and data parameters for each sensory node.

Status: Expected to be completed by May 2014
Funded by: Grant from SSU Provost Office & Grant from CSU Campus as a Living Laboratory
More Information:  Web page

Smarden: The Smart Garden

The Smarden is short for smart garden. The idea behind the project is to create an autonomous garden that can monitor and water itself wirelessly. While recording data such as temperature, humidity, sunlight, and soil moisture. This is desirable because as the world population increases resources are only going to get more scarce, and who doesn't like water conservation.   

Status: Expected to be completed by May 2014
Funded by: Student Research Project at SSU & Grant from CSU Campus as a Living Laboratory
More Information:  Web page

Environmental Sensor Projects at SSU Fairfield Osborn Preserve

AITIS Laboratory is currently in process of implementing a number Environmental Sensor Network projects at the SSU Fairfield Osborn Preserve.  These interdisciplinary projects have three main objectives: (1) to improve the robustness and flexibility of the existing network, (2) to create and deploy a WiFi-base backbone so variety of IP-based sensors can be deployed, (3) to design an open-frame network where various research projects related to communications and networking can be tested.

Currently, the following projects are active:
1- SkyViewer - a sensor network that can be activated by variety of sensors, such as motion detectors, temperature,  sound, etc.
2- Indoor monitoring system - adding an indoor wireless touchscreen monitor to view weather conditions, and power consumption
3- Improve the  existing weather station and strengthening its wireless link
4- Debug the existing energy monitoring system with forced reset
5- GateKeeper - designing a monitoring system on the gate
6- Establishing a 3 node WiFi back bone
7- Exploring the possibility of combining WiFi and Fiber Optics for the backbone
8- Power monitoring system; here is a the link to OpenEnergy Monitoring
9- Water monitoring system (funded - graduate and undergraduate students can apply)
10- Installing Fiber Optics to connect the weather station to the office

See the existing projects. If you are interested in working with us please contact Dr. Farid Farahmand!

WiFi Balloon

In many environmental wireless networks lack of having line-of-sight can be a major issue. We are investigating the usage of using adverting-balloons or weather balloons for providing WiFi connections.

Status: December 2012
Sponsor: CCE

Solar-Powered Wireless Weather Station

The purpose of our project is to build the first solar-powered wireless weather station at the Fairfield Osborn Preserve. Weather stations play a critical role in Preserve programs by providing climate data relevant to a wide variety of environmental studies. While many researchers have collected data over the years for their individual projects, the Preserve has had a critical need to collect consistent reliable data from a single site to provide long-term comparisons in climate. This weather station will serve as the primary site for the Preserves long-term commitment to gathering data on changes in the environment. Read more about the project - Click here to view more pictures.

Sponsored by: Fairfield Osborn Preserve
Students: Chris Dennison and Kyler Connelly 
Status: Completed in May 2011
 

Design and Development of a Solar Power Monitoring System

The purpose of this project is to retrofit an existing off grid Solar System Power system with a wireless interface that will track system performance and provide historical performance data to better manage the utilization and future growth of power resources at the Fairfield Osborn. This is a continuing project and requires knowledge of wireless and micro-controllers. Our focus in this phase of the project is to add educational components to the monitoring system.

Here are a few things that we will specifically be focusing on:
- Making the pulling cycle changeable from the program
- Making the report time variable using a switch
- The LabView graphs should show the exact time
- Upload the data/email using modem
- Add the oil sensor
- Add email features
- Check the maintenance mode
- Add UPS
- When the system is in catch-up mode a software light should be blinking
- When the system in maintenance mode, the state must be shown in the archived data
- Create a two way communication between LabView and Zigbee
- Establish a larger wireless network.

 Status: Phase I is completed
Sponsered: Sonoma Preserve

SMS Based Sensor Monitoring

The field of research is continuing to grow with each new area and discovery. Every discovery brings researchers a new item or area to look at. With environmental studies there are still findings made daily and the more tools that are available to researchers, the more often these breakthroughs will occur. One of the challenges that are faced by researchers when doing studies in the wilderness is the remoteness of the investigation sight.
The goal of this project is to develop a sensor platform that will utilize SMS technology to transfer the values of the sensors to an off-site server. This server will then store and display the data over the internet. It is the goal to provide a platform that is flexible enough to work with a wide selection of environmental sensors and can be used at many sites such as the Fairfield Osborn preserve. An open protocol will be developed to facilitate the messages passed between the field system and the server and will have the necessary flexibility to be used for any sensor system utilizing text messaging.
We have already developed the SMS Based Sensor Monitoring platform. However, more work is required to complete this project. Contact for more information.

 Status: Phase I is completed.
Sponsered: Sonoma State University Preserve

Environmental Sensors

Advances in environmental sensor, communication, and computing technology are transforming our understanding of environmental processes on a global scale. Many wildlife regions, including Fairfield Osborn Preserve ( a 450-acre field station administered by SSU’s Field Stations & Nature Preserves), can significantly benefit from implementing a distributed wireless network to transfer data. In the following projects we intend to combine low-power IP-based data acquisition systems (i.e., environmental sensors), solar technology, and wireless Internet capability to create a state of-the-art intelligent network with advanced features to assist environmental scientist to more effectively utilize cyber-technologies:
1- Utilizing a SMS based messaging platform to transfer data from various environmental sensors;
2- Designing a solar-based wireless network on the preserve;
3- Designing a utility monitoring device to monitor the power consumption on the preserve;
4- Designing an autonomous mobile robot with vision and logging capabilities;
5- Designing PigNet - tracking the pigs on the Preserve (yes, pigs!);
6- What is a smart building? How should it operate - a survey;
7- Using Google Sketch to construct a 3D model of the Preserve.
8- Using RFID technology for tracking and monitoring animals and birds in the Preserve (here are some good resources).
9- Look into Sun SPOT World and see if we can implement a mesh network in the Preserve. There are several interesting tutorials which can be viewed.