Barbecue Team Uses Wireless Sensors to Monitor Meat
Employees of National Instruments (NI) cooked up a high-tech, wireless sensor system to help monitor meat roasting in pits, and took second place at the 2010 Austin Rodeo barbecue competition, held in March of this year. According to a report posted on NI's Web site by one of its wireless sensor network (WSN) product marketing engineers, the temperature-monitoring system was built on NI's WSN platform to monitor the temperatures of various meats as they cooked, as well as to provide temperature gradient information within the pits. NI's WSN consists of wireless nodes, gateways (which share information with applications for processing, analyzing and presenting the measurement data collected by the nodes) and routers (which extend the communication distance between the end nodes and the gateways). NI's sensor nodes operate for up to three years on 4 AA batteries, and can be deployed for long-term, remote operation. The NI WSN protocol is based on IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards. The barbecue-monitoring system relied on WSN-3212 thermocouple measurement nodes and WSN-3291 outdoor enclosures, with external antennas to monitor eight temperature channels on each of the two barbecue pits. The temperature data was displayed on a computer monitor, so event-goers could view the meat and pit temperatures. The system also included NI's newly released NI 9792 Programmable WSN Gateway, which incorporated an integrated Web server that published the information to a Web site so those at the fairgrounds could check the meats' status on their Web-enabled smart phones, and be alerted when a fresh round of barbecue was ready for serving.
