A Hybrid Sensor Network for Flexible, Unattended, Multipurpose Deployment

There have been several recent developments in Open Source Hardware that enable the creation of relatively low-cost sensors for remote deployment. The initial work done by ICFOSS for soil and atmosphere monitoring sensor networks, where the sensors had wired connections within each node, had limited their deployment to very short distances around the node. A hybrid approach using a mesh network consisting of 'motes'-based sensors is proposed in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi-based management layer to un-tether the sensors, leading to simplified field-based deployments. This approach enables multiple applications such as remote monitoring for disaster management, precision agriculture, wildlife monitoring or pollution monitoring in urban areas.