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. The current version 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. Note: From v0.1.4, we no longer support .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003. The software is release under Microsoft Research Shared Source License (MSR-SSL) Agreement. For questions and feedback, please contact: sensekit(at)microsoft.com

• architects: Jie Liu and Feng Zhao
• authors: Elaine Cheong, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, Tim Olson, Bodhi Priyantha, Siddharth Seth
• contributors: Prabal Dutta, Darren Gehring, Michel Gorazko, Ryan Newton, Alec Woo.

• 7/15/2007: MSR Sensor Network Academic Resource Toolkit DVD is released at 2007 Microsoft Faculty Summit.
• 7/15/2007: MSR Sense 1.0 is released.
• 7/17/2006: On Microsoft Faculty Summit 2006, we released a CD version of MSR Sense 0.1.4.
• 6/30/2006: We are happy to release MSR Sense 0.1.4a. Key improvements added to this release are:
  • A web service interface that allows MSR Sense to publish data to Sense Web.
  • An experimental service that will give MSR Sense a web service (server) interface.
  • Capability of loading multiple service libraries.
  • A much user friendly and statble version of Senscel.
• 1/31/2006: We released MSR Sense 0.1.3a. A key feature added to this release is the MoteForwarder, a C# version serial forwarder that converts a USB serial connection a TCP socket server connection. Thus, MSR Sense is not dependent on TinyOS and Java.
• 12/16/2005: We announced the first release of MSR Sense 0.1.2a

• Recommended Minimum Hardware Requirements
  • PC Pentium 4 1GHz
  • 512M memory
  • 100MB plus free disk space
• Recommended Operating Systems
  • Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003
• Installing Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition for development (optional)
• Installing dependent software platforms from www.microsoft.com: Note: .NET 2.0 and SQL Server Express are included in Visual Studio 2005. They do not need to be installed separately after installing Visual Studio 2005.
• Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System(VSTOR) Note: This is only the run time that allows users to run precompiled Senscel. VSTO SDK, which allows one to further develop Senscel, is not released for free download.
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
  

• mSEE (pronounced musée, and spelled miuSEE in source code): The microServer Execution Environment is a component-based runtime system that can be dynamically tasked to collect and process sensor data.
• mSIC (pronounced music, and spelled miuSIC in source code): The microServer Interaction Console is a user interface for tasking microservers and receiving data.
• MoteForwarder: This is a .NET solution for SerialForwarder found in TinyOS. MoteForwarder converts USB connections from PC to motes (basestations) into TCP socket interfaces that can be used by multiple consumers.
• Senscel (pronounced sense-cell): The Excel extension allows users to visualize and archive streaming data from microservers through an Excel spreadsheet interface.
• SenseWebPubisher: Tools for publishing sensor data to SensorMap.

• MSR Sense has only been tested on TinyOS-based sensor motes, although in theory, it should work with any 802.15.4 compatible wireless sensors.
• From data production point of view, the microserver is a socket client. A data receiver must first create a socket server in order to receive data.
• Applications that involves multiple microservers have to be configured manually (and carefully). That is, each microserver has to accept a hand tuned MSTML, and the MSTMLs have to be sent in a particular order, such that each socket client is instantiated after the corresponding socket server.
• Run-time optimization across multiple tasks is not included in this release.
• In Senscel, the Network Configuration requires every mote ID to have a unique serial forwarder. This is really not necessary, since a serial forwarder can listen to many motes at the same time. We will fix this in future releases.
• Please send us your bug reports and feature requests to sensekit(at)microsoft.com

• Jie Liu and Feng Zhao, "Towards Semantic Services for Sensor-Rich Information Systems," in Second IEEE/CreateNet International Workshop on Broadband Advanced Sensor Networks (Basenets 2005), Boston, MA, Oct. 3, 2005.
• Alec Woo, Siddharth Seth, Tim Olson, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, "A Spreadsheet Approach to Programming and Managing Sensor Networks," Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-162, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, November 2005.
• Jie Liu, Elaine Cheong, and Feng Zhao, "Semantics-Based Optimization Across Uncoordinated Tasks in Networked Embedded Systems," in Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2005), Jersey City, New Jersey, September 18-22, 2005.

• MSR Sense v0.1.2a2: code, tutorial
• MSR Sense v0.1.3a: code, tutorial