Facilities staff have received some questions about small flags that have been placed in the ground in parts of the field station. Flags are being used for a variety of purposes, including campus Environment, Health and Safety surveys and expansion of the Institute for Transportation Studies bus test track. Many of the new flags are part of a research project known as NEST (Networked Embedded Systems Technology) that is led by faculty in EECS. The research project team is preparing to place 600-1000 sensor nodes in a specific area at the RFS for a demonstration planned at the end of August. (A photo of the project "deployment area" is online at http://today.cs.berkeley.edu/nestfe/index.php/RFS_Area
The solar powered nodes, the locations of which are marked by the small flags, will make up a large wireless network on which the NEST team will run a variety of tests.)