Hi Everyone,
Just a random project idea (I'll likely send a few of these as they
occur to me). It's somewhat connected to Andy's suggestion, but has a
specific objective.
I'm aware of a bit of work going on at the moment to monitor bushfires
with wireless sensor networks. For a brief introduction:
http://tinyurl.com/yhe8h56
The idea is that you can air-drop a whole swarm of sensor packages
across an advancing bushfire front. The sensor packages communicate
as nodes in a mesh network (I'm not sure if that is the correct buzz-
word, but it sounds right this morning ;-), and then relay their
results back to a base station via the nodes that are closest to it.
The project would involve modelling the communication with the sensor
packages in software, using the latest information we can find in the
available literature; an actor setup seems ideal for that. Some kind
of server-side logging capability and a rich client to explore the
gathered data would also be ideal. The extent to which each component
would be developed in the project is really arbitrary.
Something else occurred to me while pondering the idea: are we able to
run Scala on any embedded devices (/platforms)? The SunSpot maybe?
http://www.sunspotworld.com/
If that were possible, the nodes could be developed in Scala using
simulation (with thin interfaces to hardware functions). Then, once
we had something more concrete, we could perhaps approach Sun for some
SunSpots to play with.
Jonathan Merritt.
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