Crossbow Technology has released its next-generation hardware platform for wireless sensor network research and development. The Crossbow Imote2 enables a new level of processing performance for wireless sensor networks. Integrating a high-performance, low-power, PXA271 Intel XScale processor and a 802.15.4 radio with a built-in 2.4 GHz antenna, the Imote2 provides a high-performance platform for advanced, compute-intensive wireless sensor network applications such as digital imaging and industrial vibration monitoring. The PXA271 processor on the Imote2 can be configured to support a low-voltage (0.85 V), low-frequency (13 MHz) mode as well as other scalable processing modes of up to 416 MHz. The 256 kbytes of on-chip SRAM, 32 Mbytes of SDRAM and 32 Mbytes of FLASH memory provide several orders of magnitude more resources for memory intensive applications than previous WSN hardware platforms. Power consumption is extremely low, making this platform suited for demanding but battery-powered applications, said Crossbow.

“Next-generation modules for the wireless sensor market like the Imote2 will be especially important for applications where a high-performance sensor node must be combined with low-power operation and a low duty cycle to achieve long life” said Harry Forbes, senior analyst, ARC Advisory Group. “One example of such an application in manufacturing is machine condition monitoring. A product like the Imote2 could perform complete machine analytics by itself, while using its wireless sensor network strictly for reporting the results of its analysis.”

Several I/O and sensor interfaces on the board allow the development and integration of sensor boards that leverage the full capabilities of the Imote2, making it a versatile and flexible platform for a broad range of applications, including imaging, acoustics, seismic and vibration based signal processing. The 802.15.4 standard-compliant radio supports a 250 kbps data rate with 16 channels in the 2.4 GHz band. With the integrated 2.4 GHz surface-mount antenna, a typical range of 100 feet (30 m) is achieved. For longer range requirements an external antenna can be used via an optional SMA connector.

Currently, the Imote2 is supported by several operating systems including TinyOS 1.1, TinyOS 2.0, SOS and Linux.