PowerSource

I spent the past two days at Where 2.0 in San Jose, CA, which is an O'Reilly conference devoted to trends in geospatial data rendering and interaction with this data. The audience/customer for geospatial data and interaction can be roughly described as people saying, "I need to make a map of something." Their data has more meaning – or only has meaning – when you know its location.

What does this topic have to do with power? One of the frequently mentioned applications for geospatial data is sensors.Sensor data is a poster-child app because the data is almost useless without location information – who cares that the temperature here is 105 degrees F if you don't know where "here" is? Granted that you often know inherently where the sensor is – the sensors attached to your laptop's CPU are one example. But sensors that monitor a large-scale environment, be it a factory floor, or the US-Mexico boundary, need spatial information. So now we're maybe talking about not just fixed, isolated sensors, but wireless sensor networks.

The focus of Where 2.0 is on the smushing together of different databases of physical addresses and map data, rather than the hardware characteristics of the user applications, but all of these sensor networks can't exist out in their usually harsh, distributed, expensive-to-get-to environments without power, and since most of the attendees at this conference are software-kinda people, power is a given. But for these wireless nodes, power is not a given, and most likely the nodesneed to have some way of packing their own power in or harvesting it from the environment.

But we'll let the software wonks wander in their power-access fantasy world of "…and then a miracle occurs" while they develop some extraordinarily cool applications, because these applications are going to fuel the need for wireless sensor nodes, and RFID networks, and lots of other hardware systems that require small efficient power sources that keep design engineers happily working and solving problems.

The coolest stuff I saw:

GeoRSS, which gives you the ability to syndicate your sensor results. That's not how it's presented, but that's what it can do. If you want the bigger picture, read this.

Sketchup, part of Google Earth: I want to be able to post graphics of the newest battery/fuel cell/ capacitor/FET and have readers be able to rotate it and view it from every angle, all within the article's webpage. Sketchup is presented as a 3D tool for creating structures on a map – but why not hijack it for component and product visualization?

NASA's World Wind: "World Wind is open source Windows software that lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there." Everest?? No problem – you probably get a better Virtual view from World Wind than those poor souls who actually summit it, with none of the unleasant black-appendages after-affects. Ummm, no connection to system power that I can think of…