News

• A new particle type is available: the jenpart. Its based on the integrated transceiver and microcontroller Jennic 5139. TecO has ported the lightweight IP6 ready Contiki OS to this platform and created hardware which is compatible to the particles. With this hardware we are also going the way of open hardware and software. Both is available on a dedicated Github site. For information on jenpart and other newer Jennic based sensor boards please visit https://github.com/teco-kit/Jennisense/wiki. The page is work in progress, so please check back frequently.

Particle Computer is a platform for rapid prototyping of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing environments, for Ad-Hoc (Sensor) Networks, Wearable Computers, Home Automation and Ambient Intelligence Environments. The platform consists of ready-to-run hardware components, software applications and libraries for the hardware and a set of development tools for rapid prototyping. Particle Computers hardware was TecOs part in the former Smart-Its project and consists of small embedded sensor/actuator computers with wireless communication (see picture).

Particle Computer research addresses basic problems that come up when building environments with computer systems that are integrated into (everyday) objects and environments. The aim of Particle Computers is to allow development of Ubicomp artefacts, embedded wireless sensor nodes etc. for developers not familiar with embedded systems, hardware, low-level or network programming. Particle Computer results are published open source.

In the current status Particle Computers provides a integrated environment that provide access to functionality both by embedded systems experts and by non-computer experts

• ready-to-run set of hardware components coming with embedded software that can be used without any knowledge of hardware or low-level software
• modular hardware design that still enables the developers to change configuration by changing hardware
• Integration hardware that allows you to access embedded devices from the Internet, from your PDA etc.
• Additional hardware modules that can be used for further custom hardware development
• Software that allows writing Particle Computer programs for the embedded devices or for PC based services in various languages (C, Java, Delphi)
• Tools to control supervise and configure the Particle hardware
• Tools to support development
• Services for simplest access to Particle Computer output as sensor and context information through querying a database or using the data in programs as Excel or Matlab

The devices section provides more information on how to get Particle Computers and join the Particle Computer research effort. For development information see the Developer section. and in the Forum.