USB Ambient Monitoring Dev.

The USB Ambient Monitoring Device was designed and developed for monitoring the temperature, relative humidity and light intensity level from an office space. It could be also be used in home applications. The small device could be easy connected to the USB port of the computer and the recorded information is displayed into a user-friendly interface (client software application). It is important that the device to not be placed near the cooling fan of the computer, since the measurements could be affected.

USB Ambient Monitoring Device

USB Ambient Monitoring Device

The architecture of the this system is at it was presented into the USB Device Main Architecture article and the physical layered architecture of the USB device is explained into the published paper Designing Layered Node Architecture to be used in Wireless Sensor Networks.

The client application was developed using the Microsoft Visual C# Express tool and its interface is presented into the figure below. The application detects automatically when the device was added to a USB port and startw communication with it for retrieving the parameters values. When the device is dettached from the computer the communication is stoped automatically.

Ambient Monitoring Interface

The future work, based on this device capabilities, will consider to:

• reduce the physical size of the device, which could be easily be done by using SMD (Surface Mount Device) electronic components;
• store  all recorded information into a database. This will allow the processing of the recorded data for graphical displaying and analyze. The data will be available to the user in any moment.
• to create another client application, more user-friendly, as a Gadget application (compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 OS);
• add more sensors to the device for recording and others ambient parameters;
• reduce the cost of the implementation for making device accesible to lot of people.

If you have ideas about which new features could be added to the device, please add a comment.