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Sensornet - 2009/02/20

Viewed 78 times this month, last update: 2010/04/13

Have you ever wanted to connect your boat's chart plotter to your AIS transponder, log the output of both, and be able to connect to the data stream from your laptop? No? Well I have!

Really! My boat's AIS box wants position data from an external GPS. The chart plotter outputs position data, as well as depth. I want to log the depth to a file with timestamp and position data for later map-making. I also want the chart plotter to provide that external position signal to the AIS box. I'd also like it if the position reports coming out of the AIS box would pop up as waypoints on the chart plotter.

To do that, and a VAST array of other possibilities, I started a new software project: Sensornet. Sensornet is inspired by GNUradio 's modular sink/source structure. Sensornet is composed of modules, each of which can be a sink, a source, or both. A sink module can subscribe to the output of a source module, and do whatever it wants with the data. Sensornet's "loader" reads a configuration file, then instantiates and inter-connects modules as specified.

Sensornet has an ever growing number of modules, such as:

Input/Output:

Log AIS messages to PostgreSQL

Message Parsers

NMEA AIS sentences

Message Filtering

NMEA sentence types
Parsed values

Each module has an input, output, or both. Each input and output has a type. Any output can be connected to any input, as long as they're the same type. A "manager" program loads and connects the modules, checking for type, and saving/loading config files. It also restarts modules that fail for some reason, and re-connects them into the network.

The command line usage is pretty simple, given how complex some configurations can be, for example, this is how I connect my chartplotter to my AIS box, log the oputput, and send AIS position reports out to the net, sending only heard positions and my position, but not error messages, and save the configuration to a file, so I can just use -load next time.

    sensornet.sh  
        -module serial_nmea ais /dev/ttyUSB0:38400:0:1:8:false: 
        -module serial_nmea gps /dev/ttyUSB1:4800:0:1:8:false: 
        -module logfile log biggeek-`date '+%Y%m%d'`.log 
        -module udp_nmea_client udp_out host:port 
        -module nmea_filter ais_filter AIVDM:AIVDO 
        -connect gps NMEA ais NMEA 
        -connect ais NMEA log NMEA 
        -connect gps NMEA log NMEA 
        -connect ais NMEA ais_filter NMEA 
        -connect ais_filter NMEA udp_out NMEA
        -save chartplotter-ais-log.conf

Sensornet is written entirely in the Erlang language. It's modular, multi-threaded, cross-platform nature is perfect for this application. This project also gives me a good way to learn more Erlang, one of my new favorites!

Sensornet is currently available on my CVS server but may become a sourceforge project later.

The current release of Sensornet can also be downloaded here:
sensornet-0.0.1.tgz

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