eKo Environmental System Expanded with Long Range Node

Crossbow Technology Adds High Range Capability to eKo Pro Series

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Crossbow Technology, Inc. (www.xbow.com/eko), a leading supplier of wireless sensor technology and cutting-edge environmental monitoring solutions, announced today the release of the EN2120 eKo Long Range Node. With the communication range between nodes extending up to 2 miles, the eKo Long Range node is the only true mesh wireless solution with this ability, increasing the coverage area four to five times that of other wireless solutions.

“The eKo system and specifically the new EN2120 Long Range Node allows users to gather data from a larger area with less nodes thereby reducing their installation costs and simultaneously expanding their coverage area,” said Jack Coots of Iris Connection, Inc. “In the Central Valley users have large fields and orchards making this capability crucial to enable complete cost-effective monitoring of their planted acreage.”

The Long Range Node addresses deployments with substantial areas, dense canopies and remote locations enhancing the capability of the standard eKo Node while still using the same form factor and solar recharging scheme. The eKo system provides users with the ability to collect data from multiple points through their entire site providing a micro level of detail regarding various critical parameters affecting their environment instead of relying on information from a single point.

“Using the eKo Long Range Node, we have been able to collect real-time data over a large area of the reserve with fewer nodes,” said Mike Hamilton, Reserve Director at the University of California Blue Oak Ranch Reserve. “Regardless of the varying terrain, wildlife, and vegetation, we were able to quickly and easily install the eKo system and collect vital data pertaining to our ecological and environmental research.” 

Pricing and Availability 

The eKo Pro Series System and related sensors including the new EN2120 Long Range Node is priced competitively. The system is immediately available for purchase from select distributors and online directly at www.xbow.com/eko. Sales inquiries may be directed to eKo.sales@xbow.com.

Flying Magazine Highlights Crossbow's Efforts

Excerpts from Flying Magazine 2009 Issue

Robert Goyer, Senior Editor at Flying magazine, recently flew up to Olathe, Kansas, home to Bendix/King's flight test development facility to fly the KFD840. In the current issue, Goyer relays the details of this experience:

A funny thing happened in the race to develop retrofit avionics systems for light airplanes: competition. Just a few years ago the price of a retrofit LCD primary flight display for your light single or twin was... well there was no such thing. What a difference a few years makes...With the introduction of the KFD840, Bendix/King (a division of Honeywell) has jumped into the fray, bringing to the game not only its legendary name but much of the expertise that has gone into its sister company Honeywell's Primus Epic flat-panel systems which are standard equipment in some of the most technologically advanced and expensive business jets in the world.

The KFD840 is Bendix/King's new Primary Flight Display (PFD) for piston powered aircraft and is the company's vision of what a flat-panel retrofit primary flight display should be. The display was installed in the company's Cessna 182 test bed (the same type of aircraft owned by Crossbow Technology and used for all of its development and validation flight tests) which was a great platform for the test as it represented the kind of mid-level single into which one of these new lower-priced retrofit PFDs are finding their way.

The philosophy behind the 840 is clear: to create a smart-sized, low-cost, elegant, easy-to-use, reliable and expandable system that many pilots will be able to afford to put in their panels.The most remarkable thing about retrofit flat-panel avionics systems is how competitive they are in terms of price. The suggested price for the KFD840 is $16,995 largely due to Crossbow Technology's internal ADAHRS. With solid-state ADAHRS, the mean time between failures is off the charts and the redundancy of the systems, especially with the optional battery backup is a huge improvement over most conventional vacuum powered systems.

“We see significant interest in the retrofit market for “glass cockpit” technology that makes flying easier and safer such as solid state sensors and a wide horizon. For many aircraft this will allow a pilot to add a second attitude, airspeed and altitude source, improving safety.” said Dan Barks, Business Director, GA Operators and Dealers at Honeywell. “And by working with Crossbow Technology Inc. we can allow the piston aircraft pilots to be able to have a certified glass cockpit for under $20,000, a breakthrough price point for that segment.”

Aesthetically, the 840 is clean and businesslike. There are relatively few buttons and knobs. A pair of dual concentric knobs one at either end, and five semisoft keys lined up along the bottom of the bezel are it. It represents a way to upgrade the panel with solid-state attitude and air data while being dirt simple to transition to and at a price that even a few years ago seemed simply impossible.

Crossbow is anticipating TSO approval at the end of Q3 2009. For more information on Crossbow's line of inertial systems, visit the site here.

Flying is the world's leading aviation magazine and delivers reliable information on aircraft evaluation, flying safety, invaluable advice on improving flying techniques, new product development and the latest technology.

The Business Value of Wireless Sensor Networks

Crossbow's advancements in the field of wireless sensor networks was recently featured in the current issue of M2M Magazine. The article deals with the business value of wireless sensor networks and how information derived from WSNs have a powerful effect on the way companies are making decisions in today's world. Here is an excerpt from the article:

A WSN consists of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion, or pollutants at different locations. Each node in a sensor network is typically equipped with a radio transceiver or other wireless communications device, a small microcontroller, and an energy source, usually a battery. The size of a sensor node can vary from shoebox-size to the size of a grain of dust.

Even in this economy, companies are finding it easy to make the case for investing in sensor networking. Shana Farley, Marketing Manager, Crossbow Technologies, www.xbow.com, San Jose, Calif., concurs, saying, “Companies will see significant ROI on their WSN investments because the data they are collecting and analyzing is usually in the interest of saving money on consumption, resources, manpower, equipment, etc.”

Crossbow Technology has seen its solution used in typical scenarios such as predictive maintenance on machinery to more unique applications, such as monitoring endangered species, measuring the force of a running horse at the Kentucky Derby, and determining drought conditions in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The company’s eKo Pro Series was developed for environmental monitoring. At least four sensors can be attached to one eKo Node. Once customized to a client’s specific monitoring needs, the eKo Nodes form a wireless sensor network. A base radio with standard antenna serves as a collection point, receiving data from the deployed eKo Nodes. Field data is then transmitted to the plug-and-play eKo Gateway, a self-contained embedded Linux-based Web server device. The Gateway is pre-installed with eKoView, a secure Web interface, for viewing real-time data, running reports, and setting up alerts.

For the data to be useful, a reaction must be triggered. “It might be that a perimeter intrusion automatically turns on a camera or that a sprinkler is turned off when a moisture threshold is achieved in a crop field,” says Farley.

Wireless sensor networks are opening up a new world of monitoring, just as wireless phones did for the telecommunications industry. They are enabling companies to transform their businesses. “The main idea behind WSN is that information that was so difficult to collect in the past is so easy to get today,” says Farley. “You can collect data and make smarter decisions. You do not need wires or a person collecting data 24/7. The idea is to connect the physical world with the digital world through wireless sensor networks.”

To view the full article, visit the M2M site here or for more information on Crossbow's wireless sensor networking products, click here. M2M refers to machine-to-machine communications through remote monitoring, RFID, sensor networking, smart services, telematics, and telemetry.

Wireless Sensor Networks Under Fire

Researchers at the University of Corsica off the coast of France released information regarding development efforts they have been conducting dealing with using wireless sensor networks as a reliable solution for capturing the kinematics of a fire front spreading over a fuel bed. This work was financed by the Territorial Community of Corsica to provide reliable information in fire studies and support fire fighting strategies. To do this a wireless sensor network must be able to perform three sequential actions: 1) sensing thermal data in the open as the gas temperature; 2) detecting a fire i.e., the spatial position of a flame; and 3) tracking the fire spread during its spatial and temporal evolution.

Researchers at University of Corsica took on this challenge as the Mediterranean area is a region experiencing strong ecological variations due to global climate change. Wildland and forest fires represent an important cause of natural hazards and disasters for assets and human lives every year. Early detection and accurate tracking of the fire front propagation are key points in fire fighting strategies to minimize the damage and possible casualties. According to fire managers, the delay in detecting a fire ignition in the open is considered as one of the main factors increasing the response time of the first fire fighting actions. The resulting size of the fire to be managed as the final burning area strongly depends on this response time of the first fire fighting action.

One of the great and obvious challenges in performing fire front tracking with WSNs is to avoid the destruction of the Motes by the fire. This effort shows the ability and performance of a Wireless Sensor Network, when the Motes are protected with a thermal insulation dedicated to track a fire spreading across vegetative fuels on a field scale. The resulting experimental WSN was then used in series of wildfire experiments performed in the open in vegetation areas ranging in size from 50 to 1,000 m².

Using Crossbow's MICA motes and MTS420 GPS enabled sensors, researchers designed the Firesensorsock. The goal of this protection was to dampen the thermal impact from the fire on the Motes during the fire spread and contact. This shield also had to allow both a continuous emission of data and the temperature and the hygrometry inside the sock to vary on short time scales for locating the fire’s position. This innovative technique packaged the Mote and sensors to be thermally protected, preventing their destruction and extending their lifetime beyond the fire event. With this thermal insulation, the network could be reused for subsequent events. The key was to provide a protection able to preserve continuous flow of data from sensors embedded in a thermally destructive environment, namely a large scale natural fire. When sensors were covered with Firesensorsock the temperature and humidity measured during fire experiments was relative to what was measured inside the protection. The Firesensorsock consists of several layers of thermal insulation materials: a layer of simple Zetex fiber, a layer of ceramic wool and a final layer of aluminized Zetex fiber. These layers are fixed to one another with Kevlar thread. This level of protection allowed the sensor to support prolonged fire contact and also wireless communications without any disturbance. The sensing of any significant change of thermal data in the protection, due to the change of external thermal medium governed by the fire allowed for fire detection and tracking.

The sensors were triggered by the arrival of the fire and enabled the researchers to distinguish exactly the direction of the fire’s spread. The estimation of the rate of fire spread was possible because no node was destroyed by the fire in these experiments. It should be noticed that the computed rate of spread is not the same over the whole grid. This feature is consistent with real fire dynamics: indeed, according to infrared video imaging of the horizontal plot, the fire front propagates with a strong asymmetry. The sensing of the thermal data inside the sock which suddenly varies according to the presence of a strong thermal environment, i.e., a flame, leads to the opportunity to detect the presence of a fire. This point was very important for managing fire alerts in a specific areas because it determined the action of the first fire rescue team.

Because it has not been possible to follow the evolution of a fire with current systems available, this new solution was created -  the double system (sensor + Firesensorsock) provided an adapted tool for natural fire scenarios. Results illustrated that the temperature and humidity variations in the socks allowed users to relevantly determine the presence of a fire and becomes a measurement system for the rate of fire spread in the open. The different tests performed during these fire experiments illustrate the ability of the Firesensorsock system to track the fire's evolution!