CRITTER
For those of you new to the SensorNets project, the critter is a temperature sensor that attaches to the joystick port of your computer. The use of such a sensor was designed in the 39-606 Spring 2003 Product Design class. It has become our pervasive sensor device as it uses the computing resources of the host computer such as processor, memory, network and also the analog-to-digital found on your sound card. It makes them a cheap and easily deployed pervasive sensor network. You can see pictures of the original critter at http://www.ices.cmu.edu/sensornets/news/critter1.jpg.

BUTTERFLY CALIBRATION
The critter joystick sensor device has a partner, the butterfly calibration device. When you attach a joystick to your computer, you have to manually calibrate the device so that the computer can detect its range of input values. This means that most sensors using the legacy port would each have to be manually calibrated. But no more! The butterfly calibration device performs automatic calibration. Why butterfly? It looks like one! Check out the picture at http://www.ices.cmu.edu/sensornets/news/butterfly.jpg. The calibration mechanism will be incoporated into a future version of the critter.

HOT! HOT! HOT! (DATA!)
This summer we deployed ten computers throughout the student offices on the first floor of the ICES wing. These computers collected temperature data over a week-long period amounting to about 2GB of data. There was jitter and spurious readings and lots of interesting character to the data! Next comes the data mining.

CAN YOU HEAR WHAT I FEEL
There is a whole new critter on the block. With the help of SUREthing summer research intern, Nick Disaia, the joystick sensor critter now know as the jcritter is just one of the types that can be plugged into your computer. The new critter, mcritter, attaches to the microphone port of your computer. We're still using the sound card's A/D electronics and have another nicely pervasive sensor connection.

A GLOWWORM CRITTER
If you thought the critter could only be used for temperature sensing, think again. The new critter is a light sensor. The light sensor critter is being used to show how we can create sensor networks of all kinds of sensor types. Data is being collected at this very moment.

NEW CLASS IN THE FALL
If you didn't get the information yet, there is a new interdisciplinary course offered Fall 2003. The class, 39-650 Systems Analysis and Design of Sensor Networks, will be offered Tues/Thur and its format will be similar to the widely successful 39-605 course. This class, however, is being advertised at local colleges such as Carlow, Chatham, and Pitt. I guess that makes it an inter-university inter-disciplinary course. The projects are still being defined so if you have an idea for a sensor network project please pass it along.