Design and implementation of a wireless sensor node

Recent advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, wirelesscommunications, and digital electronics have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered inshort distances. Like many other technologies first examples of wireless sensor network werebuilt and used for military applications. Nowadays wireless sensor networks are being used inhabitat monitoring, intelligent agriculture, industrial monitoring and control, homeautomation, security applications and asset tracking and supply chain mangementapplications.Wireless sensor networks consist of nodes which are capable of collecting data from itsenvoriment and deliver that data to another node or central node. Wireless sensor nodesconsist of a sensor module to gather information from the envoriment, a secondary storagemodule to store data that is collected from the sensors, a commucation module tocommunicate with the other nodes, a power management module and a microcontroller tomanage all operations.The aim of this project is to design and implement a general purpose and fully configurablewireless sensor node that can be used in applications metioned above. Firstly, we haveanalyzed several wireless sensor networks that are used in different researches and sensornodes that are used in these networks. As a result, we have constructed the hardwarearchitecture of our node and chosen components that will be used.We have developed several hardware and software to test functionality and interoperability ofthese components. We have developed a PCB design that has 6 layers, in order to minimizephysical dimensions of the node. Dimensions of our wireless sensor node is 25 mm x 25 mmx 10 mm. Power consumption of the node is depends on wireless communication module.Power consumption of the wireless communication module can be reduced by decreasingoutput power of the module. Power consumption of our node is 10.5 3A for idle mode and22.6 mA for receive mode. In transmit mode, the power consumption is 13.4mA at least and21.5 at most.Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Sensor Node, Wireless Sensor, Embedded Systems.x