Abstract: Fixed wire connection in the automatic monitoring system of water project is featured with complex wire routing, inadequate reliability and has difficulty in thunder protection. In view of this, a volume-compact, easily-connected wireless strain collector is proposed in this paper. The collector modulates the differential strain signal by half-bridge and precise instrumentation amplifier, and employs an up-to-date RF (radio frequency) system (CC2530) on chip to realize digitalization for analog voltage signal and wireless transmission. The wireless sensor nodes based on TI’s Z-stack protocol possess high performances of network self-organization and network self-healing, and support low power consumption in wireless transmission by sleep mode.

Key words: strain collection, ZigBee, wireless sensor network, monitoring of structural health, low-power dissipation