64seconds Pipeline Integrity Sensors

Synopsis

CR sensors monitor vibrations in a pipeline network. A drive-by CR base collects sensor data with an iPad app, which maps the locations of broken pipes and pipes with abnormal continuous flow.

Before deciding to develop Coriandolo Radio we considered other radio systems, assessing the design and production of 10,000 sensors.

Radio Alternatives

Cutting to essentials, Wi-Fi needed too much power and Bluetooth 2 or 4 could not wake up, link, and transmit a burst of data in a drive-by mode. Coriandolo Radio solved these problems.

1. An application trade-off among power consumption, wake-up-and-link latency, and effective data rate: Our pipeline sensors wake up once per minute when they’re on the shelf or at night, which conserves power. During the working day a sensor sends a short announcement every 4 seconds so drive-by can work, then streams 128 Kbits of recorded data on demand in less than a second.
2. A transparent CR protocol, lightweight and symmetrical: the same simple implementation works in both the CR base and the sensors. Radio communication always has thorny problems - like jamming, non-responsiveness, out of range, and doubts about the last exchange. CR overcomes these problems by giving the application designer full control of integrating the radio protocol into the application.
3. An open CR protocol, there’s no black box: anyone can debug and fix software problems simultaneously in the CR base and sensor. This includes low-level intricacies ‘at the metal’, like radio timing, or high level issues like running out of message buffers. CR lets the application designer send any kind of data at any time, under application control.

CR is a candidate for applications with low-cost, low-power sensors whose data is read from time to time by a base. The base may be fixed or mobile and often sends the sensor data onward to a cloud server and/or a computing device.

Where Coriandolo Radio Does and Does Not Fit

The many potential applications of Coriandolo Radio include examples such as property tags, sensors for spaces like vehicles, houses, museums and warehouses, wearable physiologic monitors, appliances like thermostats and light switches, among many others.

CR may not be the right choice for some applications:

1. Sensors exchanging small amounts of data directly with a phone could use Bluetooth 4
2. Sensors with access to infrastructure power could connect directly to an infrastructure Wi-Fi network
3. Remote sensors that connect directly to the internet could use a cellular modem if the application can afford cellular data charges