Open-Source Wireless Sensor System for Long-Term Monitoring of Slope Movement

Power consumption is one of the major issues associated with deploying a wireless sensor to monitor natural environments in the real world. It is not practical to frequently replace the battery of a sensor that is located in a remote mountainous area. While considering to save valuable energy, the sensor must be able to detect a particular event in a timely manner and report data. To satisfy these requirements, in this paper, we present a wireless sensor system, termed SMARTCONE, which is designed to monitor the slope movement and minimize the standby power consumption, while remaining active to detect events. Multiple SMARTCONEs need to synchronously change their operation modes to collect the physical parameters and transmit raw vibration data simultaneously. SMARTCONE is consuming a power of only 0.05 mA at 3.6 V in standby mode, which is significantly less than that consumed by the previous design. As far as we know, SMARTCONE is an unprecedented instrument for the monitoring of slope movement; no other instruments can achieve such a low-energy consumption while being triggered by external vibration and managed remotely. These complicated issues are considered while designing the SMARTCONE, whose performance is then evaluated. In order to prevent redundant effort and to reduce the entry-level knowledge required by the users who wish to design a system, and to promote the use of this design for monitoring natural environments, we would like to open source the design of SMARTCONE for the public. It can be modified for use in other applications to satisfy their requirements without the need to build from scratch.