The modern programmable portable sensor pack

Battery-powered. Built-in satellite-based Global Positioning System receiver. Accelerometer. Ambient light sensor. High-resolution camera. Powerful processor. Gigabytes of storage. Radios for communicating with Bluetooth devices, WiFi networks and cellular data systems. And now, even an embedded gyroscope.

The sensor and communications capabilities of today’s smartphones is astonishing. Each generation of device, whether from Apple or its competitors, crams more and more sophisticated electronics into a pocket-sized package, with the latest being the iPhone 4’s gyro.

All you need is a life-forms sensor and a probe for detecting buried dilithium deposits, and today’s smartphones would be right at home on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Oh, a tachyon emitter would be nice too.

We’ve been here before, of course. In early 2007, Sun Microsystems gave me a Sun SPOT development kit. A SPOT – Small Programmable Object Technology – was a battery-powered device equipped with a small ARM processor, short-distance radio, accelerometer, temperature and light sensors, some multi-colored LEDs and general-purpose analog and digital I/O ports, managed by an embedded Java virtual machine. I did some experiments with the SPOT and was impressed with its capabilities. Sadly, the Sun SPOT initiative faded out after its first limited production run.

General-purpose smartphones, whether based on Apple’s iOS (the new name for iPhone OS), Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, have the potential to revolutionize remote sensing. Not only is the array of built-in sensory apparatus impressive, but the ability to add more through hard-wired or Bluetooth connections takes that a set farther. I don’t know if there are third-party toolkits yet for adding analog and digital inputs to smartphones – but there should be.

Already there are kits for connecting smartphones to a car’s OBD-II to pull down a vast array of real-time onboard diagnostics. Software uses that data, plus the phone’s accelerometer, to measure acceleration and performance.

Look at a smartphone, and forget, for a moment, that it’s a phone. Think about its sophisticated electronics, processing power, radio capabilities, and sensory functionality. Imagine how it could be used for science and engineering — both in the lab and in the real world. Think about the low price, well under $1,000 (forgetting about carrier subsidies). Amazing, isn’t it?