The Design of a Spreadsheet Programming Interface for Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are currently difficult to program and maintain. To simplify programming we present an interface for programming sensor networks based on the concept of spreadsheets. Our interface is explicitly designed to handle habitat monitoring and animal tracking scenarios, which we believe constitute a large portion of sensor network applications. Our approach is simple enough so that scientists without strong programming backgrounds can still program and maintain a network of sensors. This Work-in-Progress explores the design of our interface and scenarios in which our design does well. This WIP also briefly explores some challenges we faced while designing our interface. We also discuss possible extensions to our design and applications that may benefit from those extensions.