DevLab is initiated by 12 technological SMEs. (Small and Medium Enterprises). The objective is to stimulate the flow of knowledge between universities, technical colleges and the SME members in order to create mid and long term business opportunities. The DevLab initiative originates from the DevClub (Development Club), one of the clusters of the Industrial Electronics branch association of the Federation of Technology Branches FHI.

Agenda

Monthly DevLab Cafés
Presentations and demonstrations from 15:00 untill 17:00, followed by an informal gathering with drinks and bytes. Here you will meet a variety of people who are more or less related to, or interested in DevLab. Admission is free of charge.

Next DevLab Café: Friday June 25, 2010 - the yearly Be proud and show it event

See the detailed agenda for an overview of the dates and the program.

News

succesful "Be proud and show it" event

The DevLab Café of June 25 was a socalled "be proud and show it" event, where a lot of demonstrations were shown. Visitors were able to talk with the researchers of the many research topics of the past year. Many demonstrations were focussing on the MyriaNed technology, but also the research on body area networks at the Holst Center, and the actuation structure of Atalanta, the electromechnical butterfly, was shown. A lot of visitors attended this Café despite the very nice weather on the Friday afternoon.

ICY new member of DevLab
We are very happy to welcome ICY as a new member company from DevLab. ICY is active in the field of wireless systems to save energy with products like the Clever thermostat, ICY-net and Building Management Systems, see the ICY website

Publication on the Atalanta project in TUDELTA
The weekly journal of the TU Delft (TUDELTA 18, May 27, 2010) has published an article on one of the DevLab projects, Atalanta. Phd researcher Caspar Bolsman has been working on the flapping wing structure and actuation of Atalanta under the supervision of assistant professor Hans Goossen. You can read the article (in English) by clicking the link.

MyriaNed as reservation system in a train
Amsterdam, 26 april 2010, CHESS has successfully tested a full self-organizing wireless node network in the Fyra Hispeed train of the Dutch en Belgium railway companies. More than 500 MyriaNed©Nodes where placed in a long train with seven carriages. For each seat one Myria-Node with a simple LED indicates the seat is free or not. The goal of the test was to demonstrate the easy deployment of the Myria-Nodes network and operation without problems. In less than 2 hours the complete network was up and running!
The technical goal was to find out the network behavior in the entire train, behavior between the clutches of the carriages and the proper operation in this environment. The clutch between the carriages is a construction with a lot of metal and cabling and could be a problem to the low power radio signal of the nodes network. During the test people were walking through the train and other trains went by on other tracks.

The network communication appeared to be without any problems. A few extra nodes at each balcony of the train connected the carriage with eachother. The self-organizing character of the MyriaNed© network took care of a robust operating network. The 'ad hoc' Gossip network protocol is used in the mac-layer (called Gmac) of MyriaNed©. With Gossip, network-management is not necessary and the commissioning of the network is very easy. Also the network is auto-re-establishing: each node will auto-configure in the network, also if the connection is temporarily disconnected for whatever reason. Finally, a self-organizing wireless node network was demonstrated at large scale, which can not be done with other protocols like Zigbee.

Successful 1000 nodes experiment
On January 11th, DevLab started the year of 2010 with a successful 1000 nodes experiment. For the first time in history the MyriaNed mesh network platform, running the gossip protocol for communication, was scaled up to a 1000 nodes. Although it is too early to inform about the results of this experiment, we can already say that the network has been able to scale up. After an introductory presentation at Chess, more than 50 people witnessed the experiment across the street in "de Lichtfabriek" in Haarlem. In order to show that the network was really in operation, a number of different light applications were demonstrated (see photo). Also some unexpected behaviour was experienced, so the researchers now have a lot to analyse: 15 GB of data has been logged in the network.

Students

Related to our projects, we have defined a large number of graduation assignements on different levels, university and/or colleges/universities of applied sciences (Dutch=HBO). Are you a student looking for a challenging assignement in the field of electronics, informatics, embedded systems or electromechanical engineering? Take a look at our state-of-the-art assignments and get in contact with DevLab.