If you are sweating the embedded design challenges ahead in what enthusiasts are calling a ‘trillion sensor world’, there are many resources available for useful how-to guidelines.

Mark Cantrell and Bikiran Goswami look at the Serial Peripheral Interface Bus (SPI), its constraints, and how to deal with those constraints in isolated systems using the company’s ADuM3150 in high bandwidth sensor applications.

This article describes a cost-effective, low-power, liquid-level control and delivery system based on data acquisition systems (DASs) that use a compensated silicon pressure sensor and a high-precision delta-sigma ADC.

The author explains how a sensor controller can help reduce the overall system power consumption in mobile computing devices, and uses the MSP430 MCU to provide power consumption data.

The basics of ultraviolet radiation in sunlight and how to use UV index sensor circuits to build a wearable device that warns of harmful sun exposure.

The importance of sensor fusion in embedded systems employing increasing numbers of sensors.

A mobile sensing platform for fruit picking on a glove that integrates severalsensors, such as touch pressure, imaging, inertial measurements, localization and an RFID reader.

Design of a wireless sensor node based on STM32F103RE MCU and TI's CC2430 radiofrequency chip using a serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus as the communication and control between the microcontroller and the CC2430.

An OSGi-based middleware, called Sensor Node Plug-in System (SNPS), where sensors are no longer low-level devices producing raw measurement data, but act as “services” to be used and composed over the Internet in a simple and standardized way.

A search by example approach to finding objects on the Internet and Web of Things that uses fuzzy logic and search-by-example to provide access sensors that produced similar output in the past.

A two-level sensor fusion-based event detection technique for wireless sensor networks that uses a fusion algorithm to gather information and reach a consensus among individual detection decisions made by sensor nodes.

The design of a wearable smart phone based camera that fuses data from wireless sensor networks , GPS, Bluetooth, and other modalities to provide accurate location positioning.

An ARM 9-based Samsung S3C2440 microprocessor is used to build a wireless sensor network for temperature measurement in vehicles using the Linux OS to support the hardware.

The two most important operations in a sensor network are data dissemination and data gathering. This excerpt, from Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Architectures and Protocols provides the basics and a good discussion on both.