OCE Discovery 2011
May 19, 2011
Sprouts Sensor Platform was previewed yesterday during the OCE Discovery event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The platform attracted an alarming number of leading universities and industrial companies in Canada.
“We had a surprising large number of visitors that wanted to get their hands on the platform asap” -Ed Koush
Sprouts is a general purpose sensor platform with a unique cost effective, ultra low power, remote triggered, and service oriented PnP features that allow the platform to be easily deployed in wide variety of industrial sensor applications. The Event shed the light on the necessity of an industrial PnP sensor platforms based in Canada to serve the Canadian production industry, which is exactly what Sprouts is offering.
Students monitor Syncrude system on smartphones
A new system for detecting wear in Syncrude Canada’s tungsten-topped vibrating screens – critical to the trans-port of raw oilsands in a slurry system called hydro transport – could save the firm millions of dollars in premature replacements and shutdowns.
But the clever technology – in which nodes the size of a quarter are combined with specially designed plug-in sensors that measure thickness and then communicate as a network – has a lot of potential in a wide variety of other areas, everything from wildlife studies to forest fire tracking and smart grid electricity monitoring.
“Most of the work is not to build this little thing (the node), but the communication between all these little nodes and the (computer) brain, and how it would work in harsh environments,” said Khaled Obaia, head of Syncrude’s condition monitoring project.
read more … here