By Tom and Alex Parkinson
SAMBA is a system comprised of remote sensors deployed throughout commercial office environments to measure and improve Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). The system collects data points — enabling building managers to improve IEQ and save costs.
Making use of wireless technologies like Zigbee mesh networking and cellular data communications the system can be deployed throughout buildings with only one gateway per building — making it extremely cost effective.
Within each node are multiple sensors to monitor temperature, sound levels, lighting, and indoor air quality. Each node is equipped with an ATmega328 processor running a simple Arduino sketch. Once the data is collected it hops from XBee to XBee until it reaches the central hub to be sent over the web to SAMBA’s server. Data is sent from each node at an interval of once every 5 minutes.