IDF San Francisco: Intel Mote

At IDF in San Francisco Intel introduced the Mote project. The idea of it is to create an intellectual self-organizing wireless network of miniature battery-powered devices equipped with radio transceivers — Motes. The platform is highly modular, requires very low power and has low cost of mass production.

According to the developers, such networks of wireless sensors can be used everywhere, from agriculture to industry and military applications.

Currently there are three vectors of development: further reduction of power consumption, higher levels of integration and higher reconfigurability.

Each Mote bases on an XScale processor. According to the company, this enables battery life of 6-12 months. A Mote works under the Tiny OS that considers specifics of embedded systems with radio interfaces (Bluetooth, in particular).

Speaking of pictures, on the first one you can see the first stage of this project. Early Motes were based on 8-bit controllers, had low memory and couldn´t provide high computational power or bandwidth. Their primary feature was low power consumption.

As one of the Mote application examples Intel introduced its own Fab:

And the water supply system in Boston.

And this is how pipe control sensor communicates with a wireless hub.

And this is how a network of Motes operates:

Mote2 is an advanced variant based on a 32-bit XScale PXA 271 processor. Works longer, emits farther, consumes less.

Various platform components. The closest to you is Mote2.

Mote2 in its glory:

Source: Our reporter at IDF

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