Hello from St Louis! Just wrapping up a week of ISA symposium and meetings before heading home for a month and my list of summer yard chores.
Last week was the 57 IIS, International Instrumentation Symposium where the ISA Communications Division of which I am the Director participated by programming 3 sessions during the week. We had one session on Telemetry, another on Wireless featuring an interesting presentation by Wayne Manges on Hybrid Spread Spectrum which uses XOR bit logic in the MAC Layer to enable multiple frequency hops during the transmission of a single bit. More information on this technology can be found at the ORNL web site at http://trustworthywireless.ornl.gov/ I for one am planning to watch this a little more closely.
The Communications Division is also working on bringing another very interesting technology to the forefront by sponsoring the first annual “Passive Wireless Sensor-Tag (PWST)Workshop” at the Westlake Club, 570 WestLake Park Blvd., Houston TX 77079 on July 27-28, 2011.
A PWST has no battery, no need for scavenging power and (of course) no need for a wired connection between the sensor and the data acquisition system. In a manner somewhat similar to a classic passive RFID tag, the PWST responds to a wireless interrogation signal from a reader, but unlike RFID it provides a real-time sensor reading along with its unique tag id, stored information and range.
The workshop will explore ways to PWSTs in a variety of fields, present and demonstrate current technologies, explore current and future applications of PWSTs in various industries (commercial buildings, industrial settings, transportation, aerospace, etc.). A key component of the two-day PWST Workshop is to facilitate discussions between end users and suppliers on application areas of mutual interest.
More information on the Sensor-tag workshop can be found at http://www.isa.org/MSTemplate.cfm?Section=Announcements&Site=Computer_Tech__Division&Template=/ContentManagement/MSContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=86525 and plans are already underway for the 2012 event.
