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

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!

Generating Energy Using Your Bike!

The purpose of this project is to use Faraday's principle of magnetic induction and generate power. This power can be stored. The idea is to generate enough power so the bike can operate on its own or produce enough energy to operate a web cam or a computer. One way to implement this is by modifying bike rims. There are many innovative possible ways to make the modifications. The challenge is to ensure that as a result of such modification, the bike performance is not degraded (e.g., there is no major change in balance, noise, weight or the bike).   

Remote Water/Power Monitoring

Average person in the United States consumes about 600 liters of water per day!  An average American household consumes 11,209 kWh per year. In fact, a US house hold uses three times more electricity for lighting, and twice as much in refrigerators than in the EU. Consider these: 1 in 8 people, nearly 900 million worldwide, lack safe drinking water; we can save up to 8 gallons of water a day simply by turning off the tap while we brush our teeth in the morning and at night (watch the water crisis!) In this project our objective is to design a simple monitoring system that can monitor our electricity and power consumption in real time. Various technologies can be considered to monitor water flow including sound and laser doppler velocimetry (LDV). 

Status: Pending
Sponsor: Pending

Monitoring Copeland Creek Water Quality

The goal of this project is to develop a sensor platform that monitors the water flow through the Copeland creek as it passes through the Sonoma State University. Using installed sensors in the creek the quality and flow of the water is measured, recorded, and transmitted to the Sonoma Preserve Server. The real-time data will be available through Internet. The first prototype was completed in Sep. 2011.

Status: Expected to be completed by December 2011
Sponsor: CCE
 

Intelligent Mobile Environmental Geo-Sensor (iMEG)

Sonoma County offers a rich variety of interwoven soils, elevations, and micro-climates. The aim of this project is to design a mobile distributed sensor network to measure various climate changes across the country. The iMEG (Intelligent Mobile Environmental Geo-Sensor), also known as climate pod, can record the climate conditions of different locations we visit! iMEG can be installed on moving vehicles or simply put in a backpack. The logged data can be transmitted to the server located at the Sonoma State University, which will be available to remote users to study. For more information click here. Download this temperature KMZ file example or  humidity KMZ file example to view humidity and temperature changes using Google Earth.

 Status: To be completed by before 2012
Sponsored: Bodega Marine Laboratory (BML)
Participants: Peiwen Yu (Graduate Student)

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
 

Micro Wind Turbine Generator Module

A wind turbine converts wind energy into electricity. Two of the biggest hurdles for using wind power have been cost and the need for strong winds. New turbine designs are focusing on reducing the number of moving parts and improving efficiency. The Department of Engineering Science is collaborating with AGLOBAL TECH to test and verify a new Micro Wind Turbine which can be feasible and affordable for remote third world villages and urban settings, where towers are not practical or allowed.

Status: Completed in May 2011
Sponsor: AGlobal Tech

Energy Efficient Optical Network

As the demand for new Internet services, such as 3-D online gaming, video conferencing and learning, video telephony and downloading, and high-definition video-on-demand, becomes more widespread, the amount of electricity used by servers, communication devices, and Internet infrastructure continue to be a major concern. Various studies show that in 2005 the total energy used by data centers (including their associated infrastructure) was about 1.5% of the total U.S. electricity consumption. This is equivalent to the electricity consumed by six million homes or about three billion dollars and eight million tons of CO2emission. It is estimated that the annual IP traffic in 2012 will be about eight times larger than its level in 2005, surging the total energy cost to about 24 billion dollars.

The objective of this research is to examine and compare the power consumption between optical cross-connect equipment based on electrical and photonic matrix switching. We also like to study modular optical node architecture that is capable of offering energy-awareness in QoS-enabled traffic grooming.

Status: Ongoing
Collaborators: University of Texas at Dallas, and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy
Publications: Click here...

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.

Green Optical Networking

The amount of energy spent for network infrastructures can be significantly reduces using energy-aware protocols. This in turn can reduce CO2 emission in order of million metric tons. Recently, the idea of energy conservation in network infrastructure has been presented in a number of works. However, thus far, less attentions are given on power-conserving issue for optical networks. Our research focus is to design new architectures and protocols to improve energy consumptions of optical networks. We are currently working on a number of approaches:
1- Using Optical Burst Switching as an underlying switching mechanism to reduce energy consumptions.
2- Designing an energy-aware approach to improve overall energy consumption of optical nodes.
3- A number of works in wireless sensor networks have suggested cluster-based energy-adaptive MAC protocols to conserve total network energy requirements. Similar approach can be used by utilizing bundle layer in optical networks.