Why Termites?
Sensors have surrounded us in the built environment for decades. However, the technology has been reserved for those in the fields of engineering and the sciences. The goal is to remove the existing barriers by creating tools that people of any disciplines can utilize in an intuitive way.
The cost of sensors prohibited designers and researchers from making use of these technologies. It is our belief that tools used for education and creating should be affordable. Especially if we are to deploy research in contexts that may be less affluent. With the ubiquitous adoption of mobile technologies, the cost of technology has dropped significantly. It is now possible to use this affordable technology at our disposal to create low-cost tools that allow people to sense, create and control.
Wifi access
Wifi is what really made an “Internet of Things” possible. A major advantage of Termites is that they do not require additional routing devices. Meaning that the Termites can talk to other devices or servers without additional hubs normally required to relay messages to the cloud.
Bluetooth for example would have to be routed to a central Bluetooth device which then in turn talks to a Wifi module. We are bypassing the middle-man. In our experience this allows for a low key hardware deployment with minimal effort.
What about the power consumption you may ask? We have put a lot of effort into the Termites hibernating routings which save a lot of power. They only use the Wifi network when required. Our standard sampling interval is 10 minutes, unless the Termite is woken up by external forces. In which case they connect to the cloud, report that they were woken, and return to their hibernating state.