Towards the design and development of a multinode wireless system for pulsating sensors

The paper presents introduction of wireless connectivity to pulsating sensors, a new class of sensors developed in-house and deployed in many physical and physico-chemical applications. For this a multi-node wireless system has been designed. The present design constitutes a base receiver station and multiple sensor nodes, which form a wireless network. The sensor output, which is in direct digital domain, is processed to obtain pulse frequency, a function of parameter being sensed. It is further sent to the base station by the sensor node. The base station processes the data, displays it to the user and sends it to the PC for further analysis. The base station is realized in FPGA using Soft-core processor TSK3000 and peripheral controllers whereas the sensor node is made `smart and wireless' by implementing microcontroller and wireless module. The wireless system is established using IEEE 802.15.4 standard ZigBee protocol. The present design has been successfully tested for data transmission using Altium Development Board and a multiple number of pulsating sensors of different types up to 75 meter inside the building and 800 meter in open space.