A software set for environment monitoring networks

This paper describes a set of software programs expressly designed and coded to be used in a buoy-base environmental monitoring network. The network consists of seven remote acquisition stations mounted on coastal buoys in Sicilia and Apulia and a control base located in Messina. The peculiarity of the software and of the transmission system (GSM) enables one to locate the base staton wherever preferred, without the need for coastal repeaters. The data acquistion system is base on PC104 standard boards, hosting a ROMDOS operating system under which the control program runs. The first program runs on the remote stations and manages all the data acquisition and transmission operations; a sequence manager starts every hour a macro-command sequence that can be different for each time and is remotely reprogrammable; new releases of the software and of the sequences are uploadable to the station without suspending its normal activity.