Crossbow Releases Crossbow Imote2

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Crossbow Technology has announced the Crossbow Imote2, a hardware platform for wireless sensor network research and development. The Crossbow Imote2 enables a new level of processing performance for wireless sensor networks and is a commercial release of the Intel Mote 2 design licensed from Intel. Integrating a high performance, low power, PXA271 Intel XScale processor and a 802.15.4 radio with a built in 2.4 GHz antenna, the Imote2 provides a platform for advanced, compute intensive wireless sensor network applications such as digital imaging and industrial vibration monitoring.

The PXA271 processor on the Imote2 can be configured to support a low voltage (0.85V), low frequency (13 MHz) mode as well as other scalable processing modes of up to 416 MHz. The 256KB of on-chip SRAM, 32 MB of SDRAM and 32MB of FLASH memory provide several orders of magnitude more resources for memory intensive applications than previous WSN hardware platforms. Power consumption is extremely low making this platform ideally suited for demanding but battery powered applications.

Several I/O and sensor interfaces on the board allow the development and integration of sensor boards that leverage the full capabilities of the Imote2, making it a versatile and flexible platform for a broad range of applications, including imaging, acoustics, seismic and vibration based signal processing. The 802.15.4 standard compliant radio supports a 250kb/s data rate with 16 channels in the 2.4 GHz band. With the integrated 2.4 GHz surface mount antenna, a typical range of 100 feet (30m) is achieved. For longer range requirements an external antenna can be used via an optional SMA connector. Currently, the Imote2 is supported by several operating systems including TinyOS 1.1, TinyOS 2.0, SOS and Linux.

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