The Hydra project is dependent upon a three other of my projects:
- The Orb: Power and Communications
- Tentacle - Thermocouple: Very High Temperature readings
- Tentacle - Temperature: Ambient Temperature readings.

Combining the Hydra with the sensors will create a large scale sensor network of One Wire devices that can be collected and monitored remotely via the Hydra's serial communication facilities.

Testing in the lab has shown the Hydra has the ability to read an enormous number of One Wire devices (in excess of 500 sensors per port). The maximum number of sensors will be limited by the capacitive effects of the wires used to create the One Wire bus and by the memory capacity of the Hydra.

The Hydra will take advantage of the 128KB of internal MSP430 FRAM but when that is not enough then the data can be:
- Stored in the external 256Kx8 FRAM or
- Stored the on-board SD Card slot or
- Send to another system via the I2C port on the 40 pin headers eg: CC3200 LaunchPad or
- Send to anther system via the Serial port on the 40 pin headers eg: PC running a node.js server program