ELJonline: WANDER: a Portable Linux Data-Collection System

“One of the most entertaining aspects of spending an otherwise
exhausting decade conjuring a geeked-out, canoe-scale, Linux-based,
amphibian pedal/solar/sail trimaran, is that every new twist in the
project involves steep learning curves and, in many cases,
spin-offs. Usually these manifest themselves as publications and
other obvious ways of piping ideas back into the Open Source
community that has done so much to make the Microship adventure
possible, but occasionally something utterly unexpected falls out
of the boat lab.

“The WANDER Project certainly fits this category. A couple of
years ago, I was contacted by Dave Hughes of the NSF Wireless Field
Test Project and enjoined to “clone” the Microship core Linux
system for use as a ruggedized field data-collection tool. This
seemed like an easy and productive technology-transfer project, so
I quickly agreed.

“Naturally, it was not to be so simple; there was an almost
immediate divergence between the boat system design and that of the
WANDER box. The former was becoming more and more wrapped around a
rich user interface that could migrate transparently among wireless
handhelds running VNC clients, with applications ranging far beyond
data collection to include active control, security and
communications. The latter, meanwhile, was becoming ever more
focused on the problem of deploying a flexible database-centric
tool into harsh environments, scriptable by moderately technical
end users, able to inhale readings from multiple sensor channels,
associate them with time and GPS coordinates, and then eventually
transmit accumulated data via Globalstar satellite phone. It also
would have to be power-efficient enough to allow unattended solar
operation, so WANDER took on a life of its own…”

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