《Project_Final》.docVIP

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING SCIENCES Acknowledgements From the middle of February, I started to do the individual project. I do appreciate that Durham University provide me the opportunity of such an interesting and challenging research and development project. There are a few of people who gave me lots of help during the whole working time. Firstly, I would thank to my supervisor, Dr. Dagou Zeze who gave me a constant guidance and supervision throughout the duration. It would not be possible to achieve the goal without his help. Several discussions and appointments with my program director Mr. Peter Baxendale gave me lots of suggestions and a good insight of the communication section of the project. I would like to thank him for this. I also own my thanks to Mr. Joe Atherton and Miss Linzi Dodd for giving me help of using the hardware designing software. Additional thanks to Mr. Joe who gave me lots of information on the science background of the project. At last, I would thank to the technicians in the electronics workshop Ian Hutchinson and Neil Clarey for their advice and assistance in PCB boards generation.  Summary The purpose of this project is to develop a system which provides remote monitoring control for collecting field sensors data. A novel thermal sensor has been fabricated in Durham University which has the capability to measure thermal conductivity of various materials. This system would take the sensor from laboratory to practical exploitation. This report has given a solution to the requirement. The main idea is to use the ZigBee technique as the monitoring protocol and provide the users an interface of controlling the sensor data collection. It has the feature of low power consumption, simple protocol and flexible structure. The system consists of both hardware and software development. The hardware includes the coordinator and sensor node design. Both of them use the microcontroller ATmega16 from Atmel which provides the highest abilit