A New Light Sensing Module for Mica Motes

In The 4th IEEE Conference on Sensors , 0 pages , Irvine, CA , October - November 2005.

NESL Technical Report #: TR-UCLA-NESL-200507-01

We present the Illumimote, a new light sensing module for the Mica mote platform. The Illumimote achieves performance comparable to a commercial light intensity meter, while conforming to the size and energy constraints imposed by its application in wireless sensor networks. The Illumimote was developed to replace the Mica sensor board (MTS310) whose slow response time and narrow dynamic range in light intensity capture is unsuitable to many applications, including media production. The Illumimote features significantly improved SNR due to its adoption of high-end photo sensors, amplification and conversion circuits coupled with active noise suppression, application-tuned filter networks, and a noise-attentive manual layout. Unlike the MTS310, the Illumimote can capture RGB color intensity (for color temperature calculation) and incident light angle (which discerns the angle of ray arrival from the strongest source). Our prototype demonstrated significantly faster response time (> 6x) and a much wider dynamic range (> 10x) in light intensity measurement as compared with the MTS310. The light-angle estimation results were well correlated with an average error of just 2.63 degree.

• Heemin Park
• Jonathan Friedman
• Jeff Burke
• Mani B Srivastava

• PDF file of paper

• ADCS : Distributed Control over Ad-hoc Sensor Actuator Networks
• Illumimote : Wide-dynamic-range, high-fidelity, multi-modal light sensor module
• Illuminator : Intelligent Light Control System for Entertainment and Media Production

Conference Paper