Original post by Corinne Clinch:

Since the Waspmotes and sensors arrived last Monday, my work has shifted focus and narrowed in on testing their capabilities and uses on Ashesi’s campus. So far, I checked the functionality and categorically labeled the new equipment. Each of the five Waspmotes, or “motes,” can transmit via XBee module to the USB gateway device. The flexible solar panels work just fine, and the ultrasound sensor (bought for the waste monitoring project) has successfully told me the respective distances from itself to the wall, ceiling, and my own face. I’ve now been wirelessly transmitting frames from the ultrasound sensor that look like this:

The important and surprisingly difficult step is to make a ‘sniffer code’ to read in those communications through a serial port to a program which can insert them to our database. We (myself and the mentors who have been sacrificing their time to help me) have played around with two possible program designs. One idea is C++ code that parses the frames and inserts them properly to a specified database table, and the other is a Java file that will read in everything and save it before any parsing is done. Stay tuned to hear how this last technical struggle works out in our final week at Ashesi!