Development of an Open Field Server and Sensor Cloud System

Abstract

Field Servers can collect real-time sensor data, control devices such as solenoids for irrigation, and test devices such as newly developed sensors in open fields. Therefore, they should be multifunctional, but they also must portable and safe to operate. In creating Field Servers, cost and performance must be balanced, especially in the early stages of development, so we proposed the creation of an “Open-FS (Open Field Server)” from open-source hardware. We also proposed the use of a “Sensor Cloud” as a low-cost method to collect, share, and view sensor data, and developed a system that could be used on publicly available cloud sources such as Twitter. A viewer for the Sensor Cloud was also developed in HTML5. The performance of the system was evaluated through long-term experimental operations at several sites in India and Japan. The Open-FS and the Sensor Cloud worked sufficiently well as we expected.