Search for: All records

Web decentralization has the potential to radically change the way we produce, store, and manage data. Much of the focus of decentralization has been on blockchain tech-nologies which have high energy requirements. An alternative and potentially complementary decentralization technology exists in the form of the Solid project. Solid primarily exists for the decentralization of online social data that is prevalent in social media. However, many of the key challenges to realizing a decentralized social web exist in the current Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-especially industrial IoT-is currently a collection of many intranets of things rather than an interconnected network of machines. Those devices that are public facing produce data and consume commands often devoid of context. Devices at the edge are resource constrained and the overhead of many decentralization technologies may be technologically infeasible or would result in performance degradation. It is our hypothesis that a mechanism to overcome some of these challenges can exist in the form of a client bridge to integrate IoT devices with the Solid infrastructure, which would in turn enable finer access control and improved context that are necessary to realize a more interconnected Internet of Things. This work demonstrates the feasibility of this paradigm, and plots future directions to bring this technology to fruition. 

Capacitive sensing technology is widely applied in ubiquitous sensing. Its low-power consumption enables it to be used in a wide variety of Industry 4.0 applications. Capacitive Sensors can be combined into Arrays (CSAs) with mutual capacitive sensing to reduce external wiring requirements. For instance, the Texas Instruments (TI) MSP430FR2676 can capture and process data from 8×8 capacitive sensor grids. However, it is limited to supporting only 64 sensors. We propose a design incorporating daisy-chaining of CSAs via the I2C serial protocol to enable support for 256 sensors. We also demonstrate a rapid prototyping implementation of 128 sensors. The extended work we plan is to implement the prototype on custom Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and maximize data update frequency. This architecture can find relevance in industries like manufacturing and farming, enhancing precision in the interaction between robots and humans/objects. 

Capacitive sensors are common ubiquitous sensing devices that permeate through many industries. The overwhelming majority of touchscreens use capacitive sensor arrays for the precise detection of touch. Many MEMS sensors use capacitance as the variable that is manipulated to detect the sensed parameter (e.g. accelerometers). However, the use of non-rigid, ambient, or custom capacitive sensor arrays has not seen the same level of adoption. CSAs (capacative sensor arrays) can be made from a wide array of materials and techniques-including 3d printing and laser ablation-to rapidly create CSAs that can be custom fit to enable proximity, force, and touch detection. This work investigates some of these materials and how they can be fabricated in a laboratory environment with a single robotic arm.