MIT Media Labs has made sensor deployment as easy as unraveling a strip of tape from your toolkit. They’ve developed SensorTape, an unroll-able, deployable network of interconnected IMU and proximity sensors packaged in a familiar form factor of a roll of masking tape.
Possibly the most interesting technical challenge in a string of connected sensor nodes is picking a protocol that will deliver appreciable data rates with low latency. For that task the folks at MIT Media labs picked a combination of I²C and peer-to-peer serial. I²C accommodates the majority of transmissions from master to tape-node slave, but addresses are assigned dynamically over serial via inter-micro-controller communication. The net effect is a fast transfer rate of 100 KHz via I²C with a protocol initialization sequence that accommodates chains of various lengths–up to 128 units long! The full details behind the protocol are in their paper available here.
With a system as reconfigurable as SensorTape, new possibilities unfold with a solid framework for deploying sensors and aggregating the data.
Source: Hackaday