The Hardware

TinyNode: We are using Shockfish's TinyNode for processing and wireless communication. The nodes are powered with Texas Instruments MSP430F1611 microcontroller and Semtech's XE1205 radio chip. They are powered with a single 3.6V lithium Thionyl Chloride battery.
Sensors: The sensors include Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and Soil moisture sensors. For Soil Moisture EC-20 and EC-5 probes from Decagon Devices are used.
Programming board: The programming board provides the connection between the base station and the PC via RS-232C interface. The external power adapter supplies power to the programming board.

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Software Used

PostgreSQL: We use PostgreSQL to the collected data. It is an easy to use database application and has drivers for pretty much all existing programming languages. Its webiste is http://www.postgresql.org.
TinyOS: The operating system on the motes is TinyOS. TinyOS is an open source operating system developed at UCB for their motes. Since then it has been widly adopted by other Universities and research groups and a lot of applications are emerging like TinyDB 'a query processing system for extracting information from a network of TinyOS sensors'.
Python, Java, PHP, nesC: In total we use four different programming languages. Each one has its applications. nesC is used on the motes side for TinyOS programming and application development. Java is used on the server side to interact with the motes and to send messages into the sensor network. PHP is used for website development. And finally, python has its application in generating graphs from data provided by the database and for some other, smaller scripts.

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