In this talk, we will first introduce research and teaching activities at UBO oriented to wireless sensor networks (WSN). These activities have recently been organized in a project associating several domains such as Electronics and Telecommunications, Physics and Chemistry, Informatics. The goal of this project is to find how these different disciplines can interact in the direction of applications known to be critical for saving resources and protecting the environment. UBO has lot of activities oriented to ocean, bio-medical, agribusiness that can take benefits from this project at medium term. At the regional level (Brittany), there is a similar initiative called Pucescom. Specific research on WSN is carried out in the Computer science department, and LabSTICC laboratory, for 3 years. The direction followed is a top down flow design for synchronous collection of data and distributed control in WSN. The flow includes network generations (random, interactive, regular, field observation using a GPS data logger), synthesis of concurrent simulators for multicore or high end graphic processors, code production for sensing devices. We will explain the relation we see between these different stages; that can compare with the flow used for the development of computer architectures. We will present our practical developments* and further ideas for automatic sensor code production. * some illustrations and videos are available at http://wsn.univ-brest.fr