Hardware for a Wireless Geophysical Monitoring Testbed

Earthen dams are critical components in our world´s water resource infrastructure, but many are at or near their intended design life. To improve safety margins and ensure water availability, advanced monitoring techniques are required. The contribution of our work is to enable cost effective geophysical monitoring via the development of a wireless hardware platform for geophysical measurements. Our custom platform, called gsMote, has the following features: high resolution and low noise analog to digital conversion, high data rate persistent on-mote storage, dynamically configurable gain and signal filters, gigabyte scale persistent data storage, powerful inter-mote radio communications, and flexible mote to gateway high speed serial communications. In this paper, we provide the details of (1) our custom wireless geophysical hardware platform and (2) our gsMote testbed site, which is a dam in Golden, CO. Finally, we include how others can obtain our gsMote platform for their geophysical monitoring application.