Welcome

My avocation is sensor electronics. From the day (many years ago) when as a Cub Scout I first hooked up a bell and a knife switch to a 6v dry cell, I have been fascinated with electrical circuitry. This has grown into an interest in monitoring sensors and initiating responses with computers. Now that I've retired, I have time to really play with this stuff.

The original purpose of this site was to simply have a web page where I could post live sensor data collected from around the house using an XBee mesh network. Oh course, as with any good project, the scope has grown. I still have a page where my sensor mesh network will post live data, but I also have a placeholder page where someday I will initiate responses based on that data. And then I decided to add some pages to "document" my sensor electronics projects. What I've documented here are more of my "big picture" design decisions. Some of these I've never put into words before. I still keep a project notebook for the day to day details of projects.

Acknowledgements

(1) The resource that really got me rolling is a book entitled "Building Wireless Sensor Networks" by Robert Faludi. It's published by O'Reilly Media and my copy is dated December, 2010. Of course, technology keeps changing so this book is a little dated. But the step-by-step introduction to XBee mesh networks is as valid as ever.

(2) The 2nd callout I want to make is to another individual I've never met: Andrew Rapp. Andrew has written (or led the collaborative writing of) XBee related libraries for both Processing (Java) and the Arduino IDE (C). Of course, the software libraries were great to have, but more importantly to me, Rapp's documentation of his software was a great resource for understanding just what my XBees were doing... and why.

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