Book excerpt: Build your own distributed sensor network to collect, analyze, and visualize real-time data about our human environment—including noise level, temperature, and people flow. With this hands-on book, you’ll learn how to turn your project idea into working hardware, using the easy-to-learn Arduino microcontroller and off-the-shelf sensors. Authors Alasdair Allan and Kipp Bradford walk you through the entire process, from prototyping a simple sensor node to performing real-time analysis on data captured by a deployed multi-sensor network. Demonstrated at recent O’Reilly Strata Conferences, the future of distributed data is already here. If you have programming experience, you can get started immediately. Wire up a circuit on a breadboard, and use the Arduino to read values from a sensor Add a microphone and infrared motion detector to your circuit Move from breadboard to prototype with Fritzing, a program that converts your circuit design into a graphical representation Simplify your design: learn use cases and limitations for using Arduino pins for power and grounding Build wireless networks with XBee radios and request data from multiple sensor platforms Visualize data from your sensor network with Processing or LabVIEW