The TECO Envboard is an environmental sensing platform for research and development purposes. It carries a variety of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors, ranging from accelerometers over weather sensors like temperature, humidity and barometric pressure to sensors for gas concentrations and particulate matter.

The Envboard is intended to be generically suitable for various application scenarios. One of them is the mobile and fine-grained measurement of air quality and pollutants in a Participatory Urban Sensing fashion, e.g in order to identify hot spots or monitor people at risk. Standard fixed measuring methods are not suitable for such scenarios.

Another application field is research in Context and Acitvity Recognition. In the current revision, the Envboard carries sensors to detect twelve different phenomena and has footprints for another six sensors.  This makes it a versatile tool to collect data, e.g. for the investigation of higher level algorithms or for the examination of sensor characteristics.

The Envboard is operated from an integrated battery or a standard USB-micro connector supplying 5V, which is also used for recharging. It can be used in a stand-alone fashion as well as in conjunction with a host device – be it a laptop computer, an Android™ phone – to which it connects via bluetooth. At the heart of the Envboard is an ATmega 2561 microcontroller, and the board can either be controlled through two hardware buttons or its API. This allows triggering sampling of the built-in sensors, configuring the board to sample periodically and send the values via bluetooth or store them on the integrated microSD card for later readout. Furthermore, callibration coefficients can be set, sampling intervals changed.

The Envboard is currently used as tool to examine various research questions.

Start/End

2011 – 2012

Research Topics

Sensor Systems, Environmental Sensing

Contact

Matthias Budde (email: budde(at)teco.edu)

Selected Publications

Follow-Ups

Project MobileDust