Background

Stemming from Greek mythology, Argus was a shepherd with one hundred eyes. It was said that at any given time, at least one eye was always awake.

The purpose of the Argus 682 Project was to design a wireless sensor platform capable of capturing automobile-oriented sensor data and transmitting it wirelessly to a base station for monitoring. While the project was a success, it was by no means a walk in the park. Many different ideas were incorporated as our design process evolved over a period of 10 weeks. Several iterations of software and hardware engineering were required to render a complete system.

The result of our work is captured here.

This site will remain dynamic as our research continues.

Group Members

Nate Distel	GPS, Physical Integration
Richard Fouts	Power Management
Solomon Gibbs	Single Board Computer, GUI Development
Aravind Mikkilineni	Single Board Computer, Microcontroller Development
Patrick Stemen	MCU, Command / Control
Max Vilimpoc	Microcontroller Dev, Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, GUI
Michael Volkerding	Wiring, Logistics

Bill of Materials / Parts Manifest

• 2 x Microchip PIC 16F877 Microcontrollers running at 4MHz
• 1 x LINX 900MHz HP-II Series Transmitter / Receiver modules, capable of 50Kbps serial transmission
• 1 x Abacomm 433MHz Transmitter / Receiver modules transmitting at 9600 bps, with serial (TTL) input
• 2 x National Semiconductor LM34 Temperature Sensors
• 1 x Analog Devices ADXL202EB +/- 2G Accelerometer
• Garmin GPS25-LVS GPS Receiver (OEM module)
• A handful of Maxim MAX233A Serial-TTL ICs (fried one or two of them)

Code Samples
Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, using Hi-Tech's C Compiler for Microchip PIC

• adc.c, A/D Converter C code
• adc.h, A/D C Header
• capture.c, Capture/Compare Module C code
• capture.h, Capture/Compare C Header
• edaemon.c, Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, the core of the sensor module, C code
• globals.c, global functions
• globals.h, global declarations
• gpsrecv.c, GPS Preemptive USART receive handler
• gpsrecv.h, GPS C Header
• serial.c, USART serial transmission helper functions
• serial.h, USART serial transmission headers
• essd.zip, ZIP-compressed sources

CrossBow wxWindows User Interface

CrossBow was the interface software built by Max Vilimpoc to interpret the data from the sensor module. Data packets were polled across the wireless serial interface, and interpreted piece by piece as specified in the packet format. wxWindows is a cross-platform user interface library written in C++ which is easy to learn and customize as needed.

One of the handy tricks we used to save on compilation time involved the use of a program called serproxy, which takes care of the dirty work needed to poll a PC serial port, and basically reroutes serial port output to a TCP/IP socket, which CrossBow then connected to with simpler polling routines.

Team Reports

EE582 Final Report	[pdf]
EE682 Interim Report	[pdf] [doc]

Final Presentation Slides

Click here to view our midterm presentation slides (February 05, 2002). Also in [ppt] and [pdf].
Click here to view the slides we created for our final presentation (March 13, 2002).

Photos