Distributed Network Data: From Hardware to Data to Visualization

by Alasdair Allan, Kipp Bradford

Build your own distributed sensor network to collect, analyze, and visualize real-time data about our human environment—including noise level, temperature, and people flow. With this hands-on book, you’ll learn how to turn your project idea into working hardware, using the easy-to-learn Arduino microcontroller and off-the-shelf sensors.
Authors Alasdair Allan and Kipp Bradford walk you through the entire process, from prototyping a simple sensor node to performing real-time analysis on data captured by a deployed multi-sensor network. Demonstrated at recent O’Reilly Strata Conferences, the future of distributed data is already here. If you have programming experience, you can get started immediately.
Wire up a circuit on a breadboard, and use the Arduino to read values from a sensor
Add a microphone and infrared motion detector to your circuit
Move from breadboard to prototype with Fritzing, a program that converts your circuit design into a graphical representation
Simplify your learn use cases and limitations for using Arduino pins for power and grounding
Build wireless networks with XBee radios and request data from multiple sensor platforms
Visualize data from your sensor network with Processing or LabVIEW

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Alasdair Allan is a British scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. An expert on the Internet of Things and sensor systems, he’s famous for hacking hotel radios, deploying a 500-node mesh sensor network at Google I/O, and for revealing, back in 2011, that Apple’s iPhone was tracking user location constantly. He has written for Make: Magazine, VICE/Motherboard, Hackster.io, Hackaday, and to the O’Reilly Radar. A former academic, he also built a peer-to-peer autonomous telescope network that detected what was, at the time, the most distant object ever discovered.