Development of Wireless Sensor Network Platform for Educational Use

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a wireless sensor network for educational use. The purpose of this development is intended to support students to develop original IoT applications using the wireless sensor network. The system consists of Raspberry Pi as a sensor server and XBee modules, which employ ZigBee as a wireless interface. All the software developed in this study is written in Python and is open to students. Students are allowed to develop their own IoT applications based on their own ideas. This paper first introduces the outline of ZigBee and XBee, then it describes the detail of XBee control by Python and its interface with CGI program. It also reports the experiments of multi-hop communication by XBee modules and the exclusive control, which is needed to keep consistency of XBee control when multiple users try to access the sensor server simultaneously. Basic functions of the sensor network have been confirmed through the experiments