/D-Cube

D-Cube is a low-cost tool that allows to accurately profile the end-to-end delay, reliability, and power consumption, of low-power wireless sensor nodes, as well as to graphically visualize their evolution in real-time. This tool has been used to set-up the EWSN 2016, 2017 and 2018 dependability competitions.

Primary LanguageCCreative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 InternationalCC-BY-SA-4.0

D-Cube Design

D-Cube is published as open source hardware under CC-BY-SA (online). D-Cube is a low-cost tool that allows to accurately profile the end-to-end delay, reliability, and power consumption, of low-power wireless sensor nodes, as well as to graphically visualize their evolution in real-time. This tool has been used to set-up the EWSN 2016, 2017 and 2018 dependability competitions.

A scientific paper about D-Cube was published at the 14th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), and is available here.

D-Cube Hardware

The design files in this repository where used to fabricate the current iteration of D-Cube. The GPS module used is a Navspark-GL. For the complementary MOSFET a NTJD4105CT2G was chosen in the final design.

The current iteration of the hardware (1.0)

d-cube hardware revision 1.0

The prototype used during EWSN 2016

d-cube hardware during ewsn2016

D-Cube Software

The Software consists of two parts

  • A task reading the ADC into a FIFO (on top of a real-time Linux kernel)
  • A task reading the FIFO and writing it to the database (InfluxDB)

D-Cube contains a power switch circuit which controls the power before the DCDC isolator. A high signal on GPIO23 is required for the ADC and the target to be supplied with power. The gpio.sh file contains an example for this.

Real-Time Linux

We used https://github.com/emlid/linux-rt-rpi but others should work fine

Visualisation

InfluxDB has many frontends available, we used grafana (http://grafana.org/)