Trillions

 
This video was brought to our attention by our friends at the WSN Blog. It looks ahead to the future of computer sensing networks and was created by Maya, who worked closely with Crossbow on the eKo system.

As we continue to scale the mountain, we are constantly forging ahead looking for ways to connect the physical world with the digital world through wireless sensor networks.

The Business Value of Wireless Sensor Networks

Crossbow's advancements in the field of wireless sensor networks was recently featured in the current issue of M2M Magazine. The article deals with the business value of wireless sensor networks and how information derived from WSNs have a powerful effect on the way companies are making decisions in today's world. Here is an excerpt from the article:

A WSN consists of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion, or pollutants at different locations. Each node in a sensor network is typically equipped with a radio transceiver or other wireless communications device, a small microcontroller, and an energy source, usually a battery. The size of a sensor node can vary from shoebox-size to the size of a grain of dust.

Even in this economy, companies are finding it easy to make the case for investing in sensor networking. Shana Farley, Marketing Manager, Crossbow Technologies, www.xbow.com, San Jose, Calif., concurs, saying, “Companies will see significant ROI on their WSN investments because the data they are collecting and analyzing is usually in the interest of saving money on consumption, resources, manpower, equipment, etc.”

Crossbow Technology has seen its solution used in typical scenarios such as predictive maintenance on machinery to more unique applications, such as monitoring endangered species, measuring the force of a running horse at the Kentucky Derby, and determining drought conditions in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The company’s eKo Pro Series was developed for environmental monitoring. At least four sensors can be attached to one eKo Node. Once customized to a client’s specific monitoring needs, the eKo Nodes form a wireless sensor network. A base radio with standard antenna serves as a collection point, receiving data from the deployed eKo Nodes. Field data is then transmitted to the plug-and-play eKo Gateway, a self-contained embedded Linux-based Web server device. The Gateway is pre-installed with eKoView, a secure Web interface, for viewing real-time data, running reports, and setting up alerts.

For the data to be useful, a reaction must be triggered. “It might be that a perimeter intrusion automatically turns on a camera or that a sprinkler is turned off when a moisture threshold is achieved in a crop field,” says Farley.

Wireless sensor networks are opening up a new world of monitoring, just as wireless phones did for the telecommunications industry. They are enabling companies to transform their businesses. “The main idea behind WSN is that information that was so difficult to collect in the past is so easy to get today,” says Farley. “You can collect data and make smarter decisions. You do not need wires or a person collecting data 24/7. The idea is to connect the physical world with the digital world through wireless sensor networks.”

To view the full article, visit the M2M site here or for more information on Crossbow's wireless sensor networking products, click here. M2M refers to machine-to-machine communications through remote monitoring, RFID, sensor networking, smart services, telematics, and telemetry.

Ways to Save Water

Crossbow's eKo system was prominently featured in the Press Democrat this week. The article highlights the importance of irrigation management and water conservation as well as the use of stress irrigation to grow higher quality grapes. Several systems were installed in Napa's Alexander Valley to highlight the benefits of using water monitoring systems. Crossbow's eKo system was one of these solutions.

To view the entire article, click here.

Six different irrigation systems are being installed side by side in an Alexander Valley vineyard in a demonstration of water conservation.

“We are looking at deep irrigation versus shallow, night versus day, one emitter per vine versus two,” said Mark Greenspan of Advanced Viticulture of Santa Rosa, a grower’s consulting firm.

The concept is to reduce water use by 10 to 20 percent, a conservation goal that is increasingly important this year as the North Coast suffers through another drier-than-normal year.

“I think it’s very valuable, potentially,” said Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Wine Grape Commission. “People change farming practices when they are convinced they can do it and it is not risky. If you can show that they can reduce water and produce a good grape crop, it is very valuable.”

The project at Hoot Owl Creek Vineyard is being financed by the Sonoma County Water Agency. The agency this year is under a proposed state order to reduce summertime flows in the Russian River and cut the amount of water it takes from the river by 25 percent to conserve water in Lake Mendocino for the fall salmon run. The state Water Resources Control Board is also proposing that conservation goals of 50 percent be set for Mendocino County and 25 percent for Sonoma County, and irrigating commercial turf be banned.

Grape growers farm about 60,000 acres in Mendocino County and in Alexander and Russian River valleys in Sonoma County. They use a third of the water in the Russian River watershed, according to water agency officials.

Greenspan believes that growers routinely over-irrigate vineyards, irrigating once a week for eight hours, using about eight gallons per vine. But that water goes too deep, soaking the soil past the root system. Roots go down as much as three feet in the soils that are common in the Russian River watershed, Greenspan said.

“You will lose a lot of water below the root system,” Greenspan said. “We want to stress the vines to produce good grapes, but not over-stress. We want less water and more often.”

Greenspan said his irrigation method has been used in a Beaulieu Vineyard ranch in Napa County for the past year, and saves 10 to 20 percent in water use. At Hoot Owl Creek Vineyard, the different irrigating systems are being installed on a half-acre plot of eight-year-old cabernet sauvignon vines. Moisture and temperature sensors will be used to monitor the soil and grapes in real time. The measurements will be sent by solar-powered transmitters from the vineyard to an Internet site, where they will be available for anyone to see.

By BOB NORBERG

To truly understand the return on investment (ROI) growers can expect to receive from using a water system management tool like the eKo platform, growers can use the eKo ROI calculator to determine how much they would need to spend to outfit their vineyard with the eKo solution and the time period during which their payback would be realized. For more information on the eKo system, visit Crossbow's site. To input your data and determine your return on investment click on the calculator below:

 

Who said it ain't easy being green?

It seems that everywhere you turn you are being encouraged to go green. I hung out with a friend the other day and she was wearing a shirt that said 'Green is the new black.' The idea of being environmentally friendly has taken our world by storm. The Discovery channel brought us Planet Earth to give us a closer look at the different environments on our planet and how little by little we are altering and damaging it. Musicians from around the world held a 24 hour concert called Live Earth to capture an audience of millions and educate them on how to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. There are more and more hybrid cars on the road and most products you buy sport the small leaf logo advertising that they are environmentally conscious. President Obama has assembled a dream team of environmental experts and specialists to focus on clean energy and climate change issues.

If you look around, you realize that our society is truly looking to conserve resources and use the technology and knowledge we have to ensure we are saving the Earth. Crossbow's eKo platform is a truly breakthrough product that revolutionizes the way we use the resources in our environment. Imagine saving water but increasing your yield and the quality of your harvest? The eKo platform is a device that not only stems from the knowledge and genius of taking any environment and making it smart, but also from knowledge of our world and how it works. The ease with which the nodes can be deployed favors leaving an environment intact without having to run wires and cables disrupting the natural flow all around. The system has been deployed in various applications ranging from the standard vineyard/ orchard/ crop monitoring, to greenhouse gas monitoring in nurseries, to measuring the snow pack/run-off to determine what type of drought conditions regions can anticipate, to structural integrity, to water level measurements, to contamination of watersheds for environmental protection and much, much more.

As we continue to see this product deployed around the world, the consistent theme is that the platform is so easy to use and leaves users with a higher understanding of the their environment. By integrating the various sensors offered with the eKo platform, users can determine when disease conditions could occur. Instead of having to spray chemicals over their entire crop, growers can pinpoint which block, row or plant is in danger. By knowing and monitoring the environmental parameters that cause these conditions, not only can they be avoided but the use of unnatural elements and chemicals can be prevented preserving the natural state of the area. The ability to gather this data, analyze it and make decisions is all available in the eKoView web application that comes free with the eKo system. Bringing this type of data collection to the internet has transformed the notion of connecting with the world around you. It is truly an eKo-centric solution to the environmental issues we face today. It seems fitting that this type of technology would come from a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, city of St. Francis patron saint of the environment, and the heart of the Silicon Valley known for its high technology advancements.

Today as we recognize Earth Day it is important for people to embrace the new technologies looking to preserve and help conserve our planet's resources. A system like eKo provides users with a solar powered wireless device thus removing the need for battery replacement and disposal. It's sealed enclosure allows it to weather the elements ranging from snow covered mountains to the heat of the California sun. It's ability to interface many types of sensors make it a requisite part of any environmental monitoring deployment. eKo provides a platform that can be used to create smart water grids, detect air pollution, do conservation studies, perform chemical detection, ensure water quality, monitor urban environments, etc. The ability to capture data in these and many more applications wirelessly and easily will help us move towards a future Earth that is cared for and that can be healed with proper conservation of its resources. Thanks to the convergence of technology and environmental awareness in eKo - It is finally easy to be green!

For more information on the eKo system, contact Crossbow Technology at eko.sales@xbow.com or at 1-800-XBOW-TEC.

GOOOOOOAAAALLLLL!!!!

Soccer (or as it is more widely known - football) has often been considered the most popular sport in the world. Wherever you go, there are kids on the street or in a park kicking around a ball, jerseys from the most popular football clubs can be seen in every major city, and the truest World Cup truly does include most of the nations on this earth. It seems fitting that Motes would enter the arena of sports through soccer. The idea behind Motes and wireless sensor networks is to create a device that will become ubiquitous throughout this planet enabling us to live in a smarter more connected world. Soccer has connected people from all over, at all ages with all levels of skill for generations, and now Motes have made their way into this arena with a little bit of fun!

Embedded systems are increasingly becoming connected through wireless networking.  These devices now form the basis of many of today’s consumer products including cell phones and video game controllers.  In the CSE466 “Software for Embedded Systems” class in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, students used the design of a multi-player video game as motivation for the  principal concepts in wireless embedded systems.  Each student in the class designed an accelerometer-based game controller and then, the class as a whole, developed a multi-player video game that allowed 28 players (the number of students in the course) to play simultaneously. How did they do it? With Motes!

Computer Engineering curricula have traditionally included the interfacing of sensing and actuation devices to microcontrollers but have not emphasized wireless communication. This time students at University of Washington undertook the task of updating the platform used in this course to Crossbow's Imote2 which runs an embedded Linux operating system and developing a multi-player video game using controllers modeled on the, then just introduced, Nintendo Wii video game controller. Previous courses had used the MICA Mote platform, but the Imote2 offered a device with greater capabilities.

Each student designed their own Wii-like accelerometer-based 2-D game controller.  An LCD screen was added so that game state could be displayed on the user’s controller during the game. The Imote2 platform offers users an expansion connector for attaching sensing and actuation hardware.  On one side, students attached the basic ITS400 Imote2 sensor board which includes a 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensors, a humidity  sensor, a light sensor, and a 4-channel A/D for further additions.  On the other side, students designed their own board to provide some actuation known as the "SuperBird".  A cell phone-size color LCD screen as well as sound generation capabilities, a speaker, microphone, and audio jacks.  This board also included a cell phone camera, jog dial, USB host port, barometer, and a heart rate sensor and is the form factor of a large cell phone. While not all of the board’s capabilities were used in this particular application, the board was designed to be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of projects (such as a video phone, music player, etc.) in the future. The Imote2 platform is based on Linux and students were provided with the device drivers for their project implementation.

 

Students decided on utilizing controllers that could move a player in two dimensions.  Soccer quickly emerged as a game that could be varied to accommodate the project requirements, namely, that it should involve every student simultaneously and require only two-dimensional control of each player.  In addition, students wanted to have some collaborative elements between players that would spur real team play - soccer being a true team sport! The game was developed in steps.  Development began with the basic player controller, that is, the mapping of values from the accelerometer to an X-Y velocity vector.  A communication protocol needed to be devised on top of the basic MAC of the 802.15.4 radio to handle the communication between players and  the game coordinator.  To ensure that there was some inter-player communication, the “captain” of the merged players (the player with
the highest number) collected all the moves of the constituent players and reported that result to the game coordinator.  The scheme was basically round-robin.  The game coordinator polled the first player for its move and waited for a response before proceeding to the next player.  If a player was too slow in responding, its movement was ignored for that round.  This provided some timing constraints on the implementations to quickly handle packets from the game coordinator.  The boards were programmed to allow students to control players in the virtual soccer-like game. Tilting the board would cause the player (represented by a dot on the field) to go in the corresponding direction.

On the final day of the course a 30-minute soccer match was held between the two sections of the class.  A video of the match and an explanation of the project can be seen here:

GOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLL for CSE466 at University of Washington!!

Robocopters and Motes

Crossbow's Motes were featured last month in an article on IEEE Spectrum. The application featured showcases how the Motes can be used when deploying mobile distributed communications networks.

The meter-long helicopters lined up under the fluorescent lab lights at the Berlin Technical University might look like overgrown toys, but they’ve got a little more under the hood. These are flying robots. They take off, land, and scout terrain autonomously and are being wired to deploy ad hoc communications sensor networks. And unlike any other robocopters, they can work together.

Researchers expect they’ll be used to distribute sensors that would help coordinate firefighting efforts or search flood zones, to track or find people and vehicles, or to shoot movies and cover sports events. Hoisting communications gear, they could one day help channel radio, Wi-Fi, or mobile phone traffic where infrastructure has been wiped out by an earthquake or other natural disaster.

Several groups around the world are working on miniaturized robot helicopters with advanced intelligence, notably in California, South Carolina, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the UK. But the Berlin team believes it is the first to write software and build systems that get multiple robot copters to collaborate. The project brings together a half-dozen institutions and companies from across Europe.

The copters’ control systems allow small craft to work together in lifting loads and scouting environments. Coordinated, the copters can lift weights that would normally require larger, exponentially more expensive machines. Estonian robotics engineer Konstantin Kondak, a professor at TU Berlin and one of the project’s leaders, says that having three or four copters in the air, each sharing the load while tethered by a rope to a single object, creates too many contrary forces for a set of human pilots to handle: “If you try to do this flying manually, it is not a stable system. You have to correct at all times; it’s too much.” But autonomous robots, making instant and coordinated adjustments, can do the job, he says.

Each robot must account for the location of the other helicopters, the forces coming from them, and the load on the rope, to jointly lift something. The helicopters’ coordination comes from a system that integrates four software modules for stabilizing the copter: one for navigation, one for exploration, one for obstacle avoidance, and one for processing orientation, horizon, and position.

The robocopters are good for much more than just lugging things around. Project manager Aníbal Ollero, a professor of engineering and automated systems at the University of Seville, in Spain, says that a flexible, easy-to-transport team of choppers makes for more efficient scouting because they automatically divide an area among themselves.

They’re also faster at another important task: deploying distributed communications networks by dropping off sets of tiny sensor nodes. These nodes combine a data processor, a radio, a battery, and—depending on what needs measuring—temperature, light, radiation, location, or chemical sensors. For the autocopter project, off-the-shelf nodes from wireless-sensor firms Crossbow Technology and Ambient Systems were optimized and linked by data-routing experts at universities in Stuttgart, Germany, and Twente, Netherlands. Just a few centimeters across and 7 millimeters thick, the individual nodes transmit over a range of just 25 meters, but as a network they pass radio messages to one another to get to a central unit (or hovering robocopter). Hundreds of thousands of these nodes could be distributed by robot to survey a forest fire or flood zone for rescue efforts, according to the researchers.

Final trials for the project get under way, far from the Berlin winter—this spring in southern Spain, Ollero says. If all goes well, helicopters will deploy a sensor network, track mobile objects and people, follow movement inside and outside of buildings, and capture it all with high-end airborne cameras.

For more information on Crossbow's Mote platforms, visit www.xbow.com.

Open SESAME!

These magical words won't take you to a cave of treasures, but they do lead us to some exciting applications for wireless sensor networks that open up a treasure trove of information previously inaccessible. SESAME: SEnsing for Sport and Managed Exercise has a vision in which athletes and coaches are continuously provided with precise and relevant information about their performance, their body state and posture, presented in a form determined by sport-specific training requirements based on a careful analysis of coaching methods and coaches’ informational needs. To realize this, athletes wear an easily-extensible range of different sensors that capture accurate information about their position, skeletal posture, muscular response, and physiology in a way that is non-intrusive and capable of working in the context in which the athlete normally performs. This setup is engineered so as not to cause injury, discomfort or performance degradation and it must not interfere with aerodynamics. Wearable sensors are complemented by track-side monitors and video capture equipment and by an integrated hardware/software/network platform designed to enable substantial volumes of data to be gathered, recorded, analyzed and presented to athletes and coaches in the most accessible and useful form. The main objective of the SESAME project is to conduct high-quality scientific research to produce deployable systems that have a positive and measurable impact on the training of elite athletes.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have just released an open source low power 802.11 sensor board tailored for Crossbow's Imote2 platform. The SESAME consortium is a multidisciplinary group consisting of 6 partners with University of Cambridge Engineering Department as a member. The sensor board developed is designed to support the high data rate requirements of the sports sensing application. The UCAM-WSB100 is a low power wireless sensor daughter board for the Imote2 platform designed to facilitate high data-rate wireless sensor applications. Developed to support the SESAME project, the board will be used to collect real-time and off-line processing and feedback in enhancing the performance of elite athletes. 

Overview of the UCAM-WSB100 sensor board:
* Compatible with the Imote2 processor board
* Low Power 802.11 b/g based on Marvell 88W8686 chipset
* Supports ad-hoc and infrastructure modes
* Access to power control of the radio system
* 12 analog channels (12-bits resolution)
* Physical dimensions: 48mm x 36mm
* Linux driver support via libertas drivers in mainline kernel

 

The information obtained from the sensors will be pre-processed on the athlete to take account of the measurements required and the prevailing network conditions. The data is then transmitted wirelessly to a base-station and application platform. Here, the data will be further fused and processed in a way that is informed by an understanding of biomechanical models of athletes; an understanding of the consequences of sensor placement error and physical properties of the method of attachment; and the coaching objective for which the data are being captured. Within SESAME, the primary experimental focus will be on sprinting, for which precise technique is hugely important and mechanical constraints on performance are well understood. Consequently, the derived data will include the position, velocity, acceleration and orientation of the athlete, their stride length and rate, body posture and instantaneous pressure in the shoes, as well as physiological data such as heart rate and blood oxygen level. The data will then be output in three different ways: they will be sent for long term storage and offline analysis; they will be presented visually to the coaches in a way that is meaningful to them; and they will be returned directly to the athlete in real time as biofeedback.

The UCAM-WSB100 is created as an open source platform. As part of the effort to develop open source hardware for use in conjunction with Crossbow's Imote2, the details of the hardware reference design (schematics, board layout diagrams) are available to the wireless sensor network community. Users will be able to easily tailor the system to their particular application. Researchers at the University of Cambridge are seeking volunteers to help improve the hardware reference design and add support for this board in other operating systems such as TinyOS and .Net. If interested in participating in this development, click here and for more information on this project, click here.

Call for Papers: the 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '09)

DCOSS is one of the premier conferences for sensor network research. It is intended to cover several aspects of distributed computing in sensor systems such as high level abstractions and models, systematic design methodologies, signal and information processing, algorithms, analysis and applications. Many of those who will be demonstrating are featured Crossbow customers.

Distributed sensor systems have become a highly active research area due to their potential for providing diverse new capabilities. Such systems allow intelligent dense monitoring of physical environments. The focus of this conference is on distributed computing issues in large-scale networked sensor systems (including algorithms, applications, systematic design techniques and tools, and in-network signal and information processing).

June 7 - 10, 2009, Marina Del Rey, USA                

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission Deadline: 11:59PM EST Jan 25, 2009
Notification: March 24, 2009
Camera Ready: March 31, 2009

Detailed submission guidelines coming soon on http://www.dcoss.org

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished manuscripts that demonstrate current research on computational aspects of distributed sensor systems. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Computation and programming models
• Energy models, minimization, awareness
• Distributed collaborative information processing
• Detection and tracking
• Theoretical performance analysis: complexity, correctness, scalability
• Abstractions for modular design
• Fault tolerance and security
• Languages, operating systems
• Task allocation, reprogramming and reconfiguration
• Dynamic resource management
• Scalable, heterogeneous architectures (node and system-level)
• Middleware interfaces, communication and processing primitives
• Design, simulation and optimization tools for deployment and operation
• Design automation and application synthesis techniques
• Closed-loop control for sensing and actuation
•  Case studies: lessons from real world deployments
• Network coding and compression

The conference will be co-located with several closely related workshops,and will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to present their contributions related to the above high-level aspects of distributed sensor systems. In addition to contributed papers, the meeting will also include keynote addresses by leading researchers, a panel discussion, and a poster session.

For more information click here.

The State of Wireless Sensor Networks

The continuous size and cost reduction of electronic devices is gradually making the vision of ubiquitous wireless sensors networks a reality. After almost a decade of extensive research, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are in the midst of the transition towards industrial deployment in various application domains such as automotive, environmental monitoring, health care, energy management, and building and industrial automation. BAIA presents a panel of outstanding experts from the academia and the industry who have played an essential role in the history and development of WSNs, including Crossbow's President/CEO, Mike Horton.

BAIA has organized an outstanding panel that will explore the state of wireless sensor networks on the evening of October 8th at UC Berkeley. Panelists include:

• Prof. David Culler, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Arch Rock
• Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder Crossbow
• Prof. Raju Pandey, UC Davis, CTO and Co-Founder Synapsense
• Prof. Kris Pister, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Dust Networks
• Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder Sentilla
• Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, UC Berkeley, CTA and Co-Founder Cadence Design Systems

Questions addressed will include:

- What applications will drive the mass deployment of WSNs both in the short and in the long term?
- What players will be most successful in the WSN domain and what business model will they adopt?
- What are the main barriers before wide adoption of WSNs?
- When will the deployment of WSNs happen in large volumes?

The event is free, but limited to 100 attendees. Learn more and register here.

San Francisco Chronicle Features Crossbow's eKo System

Crossbow's eKo system has triggered an agricultural revolution in the world of precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. This cutting edge system was recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and the story can be viewed here.

(08-31) 15:50 PDT -- On a rolling hillside planted with row upon row of Cabernet grapes, viticulturist Jason Cole waxes eloquent about the elusive notion of 'terroir,' a term French farmers use to describe the 'je ne sais quoi' of crops harvested in any given locale.

"Grapes, chocolates, coffee, these are all incredibly good at soaking up their environments and spitting them out in their fruits," said Cole, who oversees the preening and pampering of more than 500 acres of vines planted at the Stagecoach Vineyard in Napa County.

That vineyard is a test bed for a new wireless sensing technology that measures soil wetness, wind speed, temperature and humidity to take the statistical pulse of the vineyard's microclimates to help determine how often and how much to irrigate. The system being tested at Stagecoach was developed by Crossbow Technology, a privately held, 90-person San Jose company that has created inertial guidance sensors for the aviation industry and researched the use of wireless sensor networks for the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Other manufacturers of microclimate sensing systems include the Austrian company Adcon Telemetry, as well as Ranch Systems of Novato and Grape Networks of San Ramon.

The sensors that Cole is using at Stagecoach Vineyard represent one manifestation of a broader phenomenon called precision agriculture - the attempt to tailor the cultivation of large stretches of land so that the smallest possible subsection of a farm gets special but automated attention. In the Midwest, with its amber waves of grain, precision agriculture has been synonymous with huge tractors equipped with global positioning systems to keep the rows straight, for instance. But in California, the land of fruits, nuts and other specialty crops, precision agriculture has been expressed in technologies such as Cole's efforts to use wireless sensors to compute 'terroir.'

"The way that growers for many years decided whether it was time to water was they stuck their thumb in the ground," said Robert Robinson, vice president for Crossbow's wireless sensor division.

The basic field kit that Crossbow released earlier this year, priced at $3,359, consists of three sensing nodes that feed data collected in the field through an electronic gateway into what is essentially a Web page that can be viewed from any Internet-connected device. Crossbow says that basic configuration can divine the microclimate of sites as varied as a 4-acre plot of land in hilly and varied terrains such as Napa and 20 acres in the flatter, homogeneous Central Valley. Additional kits can extend the sensing network, wirelessly and indefinitely, over hill and dale.

Moisture sensors
Kneeling alongside a vine at Stagecoach Vineyard, Cole explained how the system, in addition to measuring temperature and humidity with above-ground sensors, sticks a virtual thumb deep into the soil in the form of two moisture sensors, one at a depth of 1 foot and the other at 3 feet.



"The whole point is to monitor what the roots are experiencing," Cole said. "Watering grapes is one of the most important factors to wine quality. You want to stress the vines in order to condense the flavor into smaller berries."

UC Davis Professor Stu Pettygrove, a soil specialist who has tracked precision agriculture in California, said the water-sensitivity of wine grapes, coupled with their high value relative to other agriculture products, make them a good candidate for this high-tech approach. But how many other California crops fit that description? Pistachios were the only other example Pettygrove offered. He said water-stinginess at just the right point helps burst the shells, making pistachios easy to eat.

Tree crops experiment
Professor Michael Delwiche, chairman of biological and cultural engineering at UC Davis, has experimented with wireless sensing systems that precisely apply water - sometimes mixed with chemical fertilizers in a process called fertigation - to tree crops like nectarines. So far, however, the cost benefit is not there in production orchards, he said.

Delwiche said wireless sensing systems and precision watering might find a home in commercial nurseries and flower-growing greenhouses, where the impetus is not purely economic - as measured by greater crop value - so much as it is regulatory. "They are under environmental regulation not to have runoff from the nursery location," Delwiche said. Eventually, manufacturers will try to improve the performance and bring down costs to encourage broader adoption of wireless sensing systems, he said. Meanwhile, the technology remains economical in niche markets - or exceptionally arid locales.

"In Israel, where water is so dear and they have the technological infrastructure, they're doing a lot of work in this area," Delwiche said. But at Stagecoach Vineyard, where cachet is central to the business plan, the cost of wireless sensing technology is hardly a barrier to the pursuit of quality.

"We're trying to grasp the 'terroir', but you'll always be grasping, you'll never have it all," Cole said.

For more information on the eKo system, visit the eKo site here.