A Real-Time, Wireless Pressure Monitoring System for Bucking Bulls

To evaluate the animal welfare, many ranchers would like to know the pressure on the animals due to the holsters and ropes. In this paper, a wireless real-time pressure monitoring system was designed based on wireless sensor network. The system consists of several pressure sensor nodes and a sink to coordinate the whole network, collect data from pressure sensor nodes and send the data to PC. An ultra-thin pressure sensor was integrated in the smart moteplatform to form the pressure sensor node. TinyOS, an open-source operating system and nesC language, an extension to C were applied for programming. In the lab test, the result of sensor calibration shows it has a good linearity and the packet delivery rate test verify that the system could operate stably and reliably in a better acceptable link quality. For better presenting to users, an information monitoring interface was used based on MATLAB as a simple demonstration of the whole system.

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