VirtualSense alpha: Open-Hardware Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Sensor Node

The availability of off-the-shelf micro controller units based on energy efficient 16-bit RISC processors which provide a wide range of low-power inactive modes with average current in the range of micro Watts and wake-up times in the range of micro seconds makes it possible to develop ultra-low-power sensor nodes able to run a virtual machine to speedup the development and the deployment of sensing/monitoring applications. VirtualSense is an open-hardware/open-source project which aims at the development of IEEE 802.15.4- compliant low-cost ultra-low-power wireless sensor nodes providing a Java-compatible runtime environment which grants to the programmer full control of the low-power states of the hardware. This white paper presents the hardware architecture of the alpha release of VirtualSense, based on a Texas Instruments MSP430F54xxa microcontroller unit