TinyOS

The networked sensor regime is an exciting new design space that is emerging as a result of innovations in RF Communication technology and MEMS technology. TinyOS explores the software support that is required in that design space. TinyOS is a component-based runtime environment designed to provide support for deeply embedded systems which require concurrency intensive operations while constrained by minimal hardware resources. For example, originally designed for the Smart Dust hardware platform, our scheduler fits in under 200 bytes of program memory.

Check this article out to see some of the uses of TinyOS.

Anyone is free to download and tinker with TinyOS, so you can test wireless sensor networks in a range of environments without having to reinvent the underlying technology. The TinyOS Source Code can be downloaded from here.

An interesting project here would be first of all - simply download the TinyOS code, get it working. Then use it to simulate an environment where sensors need to speak to other sensors in an area in order to conserve energy and ultimately feed information back to base.

Another way to go about working with sensor networks is through the freely available MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit (MSR Sense) from Microsoft. and there is more here on MS Sensors

The MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit (MSR Sense) is a collection of software tools that allow users to collect, process, archive, and visualize data from a sensor network. It contains a reconfigurable microserver execution environment (mSEE), a small library implementing signal processing and event detection algorithms, an extension to Excel 2003 (Senscel) to import, visualize and processing sensor data, and interface to SQL server to archive and retrieve data, and a microserver interaction console (mSIC) for users to configure and control microservers. All software is implemented in C# under visual studio 2005 and .NET framework 2.0.