Development of an Arduino-Based Trainer for Building a Wireless Sensor Network in an Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory

摘要

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is widely considered as one of the most important technology for the twenty-first century. Wireless technologies have achieved dramatic growth in recent years. They have received tremendous attention from both academia and industry all over the world, capturing the interest of various sectors. The increasing popularity of WSN has motivated universities to include the subject in their curricula. Effective learning and teaching of WSN however, requires the students to gain hands-on experience in developing WSN projects, which help the students to understand the strength and limitations of this new technology. In this paper, WSN has been simplified such that, students with little or no knowledge about microcontrollers could build one to various applications. It aims at developing a step-by-step approach to building a WSN. It first ensures that students have a friendly exposure to some components required for the tasks. The students will perform four experiments in varying complexity; starting with involving them in the use of the microcontroller, (Arduino board in this case), establishing a chat between two XBee radio modules, and to an advanced project of building a wireless sensor network.