Top 5 Strangest RAMP Applications

By: Chris Downey, Product Manager

Our RAMP Modules are great because of their general nature. They offer any developer a way of taking a serial UART and making it wireless. Anytime you need two or more things to be able to communicate at serial data rates, you can use a RAMP module. In addition the other benefits of RAMP modules, such as the ability to support large numbers of clients, long range and relatively low power consumption mean they can be used in some very unique ways. Over the years we’ve worked with developers on quite a few unique projects, here are our favorites.

5. The sensors

One customer took things to the extreme with the sleep modes on our RM024. He needed to deploy thousands of temperature sensors in an apartment building. To make the units as portable as possible, he used the sleep cycles in the RM024 to report the temperature every 20 minutes and was able to achieve an estimated 20 year battery life.

4. The Balloon

Students working on a research project with NASA were able to communicate to a weather balloon over 70 miles away using our AC4490 and some high gain antennas. The AC4490s allowed them to collect data in real-time instead of waiting to recover the balloon.

3. The Turtles

A customer developed a monitoring system for sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico to report their position. The system comprised of various base stations and repeaters along the shore and then special sensors on the turtles that would report the GPS position and relay the information back to a central server via the AC4490. The sensor was designed to report location when the turtles were on the surface.

2. The Cow

We developed a special miniaturized version of the AC4490 which would fit in a capsule with sensors and a battery back that would then be ingested by a dairy cow. The capsule was designed to rest in the first stomach of the cow and report on its health. This system is more accurate and avoids some of the issues with the cows damaging the external collars they sometimes wear.

1. The Robot Camel Jockey

Camel racing is a popular past time in the middle east, but the use of young children as jockeys has thankfully passed out of fashion- with a number of countries banning the practice all together. Enterprising developers decided to use technology to save their sport and developed robots which could ride the camels. The robots are controlled by a wireless link provided by our RAMP modules.

For more information on our RAMP modules, visit our webpage at http://www.lairdtech.com/RAMP