Environmental State Monitoring using an Unattended Wireless Network

Automatic measurement stations are widely needed to monitor environmental parameters over a wide geographical area. This paper describes an economical monitoring station based on a low cost microcontroller and employing a simple wireless protocol to relay measurements through a chain of nodes to a base station. Although the intended application was directed at river level monitoring the proposed system would be applicable in may other environmental monitoring tasks. The main part of the work involved defining an effective communications protocol for the intended application that could be handled conveniently on a microcontroller and in particular could provide for the possibility of node failure. The implementation of the prototype on a low cost microcontroller provided significant challenges which have been addressed. The resulting design shows the effectiveness of a low cost system based on this type of technology where a wide range of computing and peripheral functions are provided within one component.