editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Plug-and-Play Sensors

There’s lots of talk about wireless sensor networks these days, with differing communications schemes and management layers, but for the most part, it seems to be a roll-your own thing. If you want to put together a sensor network, then you need to design and configure the thing explicitly. There are wireless sensor nodes out there, but at least at first glance, it doesn’t appear that there’s much in the way of “complete” systems.

Libelium has addressed that with a plug-and-play approach that they call WaspMote Plug & Sense. Each “mote” has room for six sensors to be plugged in and just work. The sensors can be programmed or configured wirelessly, and the network can stay up during the whole process. Just like plugging in a USB peripheral. The sensors communicate with the Meshlium gateway, which can send data to and from the Cloud.

They make a wide range of different sensors, which is good – because this is a closed system; only Libelium sensors can be plugged in. The hub itself has a temperature sensor (which helps when compensating for the temperature sensitivities of the sensors) as well as an accelerometer. Given that this thing is going to be mounted to a telephone pole or some other such stationary location, the requirement for an accelerometer is a bit puzzling (earthquake detector?). I checked in with them, and it sounds like it was simply available on the base board that they used for the design, and it can be used to indicate any attempts at tampering.

You can find out more in their release

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jul 25, 2025
Manufacturers cover themselves by saying 'Contents may settle' in fine print on the package, to which I reply, 'Pull the other one'”it's got bells on it!'...

featured paper

Agilex™ 3 vs. Certus-N2 Devices: Head-to-Head Benchmarking on 10 OpenCores Designs

Sponsored by Altera

Explore how Agilex™ 3 FPGAs deliver up to 2.4× higher performance and 30% lower power than comparable low-cost FPGAs in embedded applications. This white paper benchmarks real workloads, highlights key architectural advantages, and shows how Agilex 3 enables efficient AI, vision, and control systems with headroom to scale.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

High Power Charging Inlets
All major truck and bus OEMs will be launching electric vehicle platforms within the next few years and in order to keep pace with on-highway and off-highway EV innovation, our charging inlets must also provide the voltage, current and charging requirements needed for these vehicles. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Drew Reetz from TE Connectivity investigate charging inlet design considerations for the next generation of industrial and commercial transportation, the differences between AC only charging and fast charge and high power charging inlets, and the benefits that TE Connectivity’s ICT high power charging inlets bring to these kinds of designs.
Aug 30, 2024
36,227 views