A Wireless Sensor Node for River Monitoring Using MSP430 and Energy Harvesting

A microcontroller is the most important component of a wireless sensor node, also called mote. It has to perform the measurements using the integrated peripherals, to post process the measured data as well as to coordinate the data transport of the wireless sensor network (WSN). The lowest possible power consumption is also a key requirement. The MSP430™ microcontroller family from Texas Instruments® enables a high processing power at low power consumption. This work demonstrates the flexibility of the microcontroller that is needed to adapt a mote to a specific application area. In this case, the application area is river monitoring. One requirement is a perpetual operation using energy harvesting. This work presents the first water level monitoring platform only using ultracapacitors as energy storage elements to compensate the irregularity of environmental energy sources. It shows how perpetual operation can be enabled by versatile high-performance and low-power modes of the MSP430.