Mike Papka‘s students from the Northern Illinois University computer science department and North Central College have been busy building the next deployment of Waggle-based Array of Things nodes on for the UChicago campus.  The first batch of nodes designed by the  School of the Art Institute of Chicago has been on campus for a couple of months.  The university wrote a short news article about the deployment.

This deployment is using Version-1 boards and the original SAIC node design.  We are now gearing up for an even bigger deployment, and by the end of the summer we will be deploying Version-2 nodes, with new and improved sensors.  Watch this space…

Argonne Story:  New Sensor Array Changes the Data Collection Game

In Russian: Интеллектуальный массив сенсоров изменит процесс сбора данных

Story at Phys.org

DOE Develops Wireless ‘Smart City’ Platform

Then Mary Catherine O’Connor from IOT Journal did a very nice story:

Waggle: An IoT Platform by Scientists, for Scientists

However, to do computer vision, and automatically recognize cars, bicycles, calculate the speed of pedestrians, visually estimate the wind in a corn field, and possibly even measure snow or rainfall from a few images, we may need a bit more computational oomph (an unscientific measure of CPU capability).  So we are testing and comparing the capabilities of the ARM A9 cores against the ARM A15+GPU cores.  The U3’s big sister the ODROID XU3.

Nicola Ferrier and Rajesh Sankaran set up the XU3 in Nicola’s office for testing.  With a little, but not a lot of library and script tweaking, the computer vision package OpenCV was installed and ready.  The picture below is a selfie taken with my iPhone of Nicola’s computer screen while OpenCV does a standard edge detection algorithm.  Identify the person in the middle with their hands up and you get a free espresso…