History of industrial wireless

Peter Welander, Control Engineering process industries editor, recently interviewed Kris Pister, CTO and co-founder of Dust Networks. This interview has now been posted on the Control Engineering Website as a podcast.

Following the interview, Welander said, “I’m not sure I’d characterize Dr. Pister as the father of industrial wireless exactly, but his efforts certainly resulted in some major steps toward making it practical and useful. Dust’s technology was behind Emerson’s early Smart Wireless offerings, and the company provided many of the building blocks for WirelessHART.”

Pister says the two things that he considered the most critical in his development efforts were reliability and low power consumption. Reliability proved to be much more difficult than he anticipated due to the very unpredictable characteristics of RF propagation, the evidence of which we see every day when dealing with cell phones. Wireless inside a plant is much tougher.

Welander says the question that got the most interesting response came when he asked if Pister thought that someday we might look back at this period of development and wish we had done some things differently. You’ll have to listen to hear the answer.

To access the podcast, visit www.controleng.com , click on the podcast tab in the multimedia box in the upper right side of the home page, click “View all podcasts,” and then select the “One road to wireless: Kris Pister and smart dust” podcast.

Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this content? You should consider contributing to our WTWH Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.