Smart Crops

About Solution

I am proposing a low cost, long range solution to monitor soil moisture. The goal is saving irrigation water and improve crop health.  

This can be accomplished with a LoRa network. Instead of WiFi or cellular towers the LoRa network can receive data from up to 10,000 nodes and up to 25 KM or 15 Miles. Batteries can last up to 4  years. The only drawback is the transmission of data is slower than WiFI.

The LoRa network consist of nodes and a gateway. The data is uploaded to IBM Cloud and a console will visualize the data. I’ve included a video of sample date being plotted in real time in a application called Grafana. It is easy to define a threshold that once reached will create alerts.

I would hope to use the Gateway that available in the City of Charlottetown for testing. This is part of the Things Network which is free to use and does not require a license. There are hundreds of Gateways around the world.  

If you cannot find a gateway that you cannot connect to than you can purchase one from The Things Network but the price is $300US. My plan would be to use the Raspberry Pi 3 as a gateway. I  was excited that Adafruit has just released a addon to the Raspberry Pi that can be used a a gateway and node.

This  Lo-Ra Gateway Raspberry Pi Hat is 8 channels Lo-Ra gateway designed and developed for Raspberry Pi board. The cost is $32US plus $35.00US for the motherboard.   

There are a huge selection of soil moisture sensors for as low as $5.00.

If you cannot find a gateway that you cannot connect to than you can purchase one from The Things Network but the price is $300US. My plan would be to use the Raspberry Pi 3 as a Gateway. I  was excited that Adafruit released a addon to the Raspberry Pi that can be used a a gateway and node.

This  LoRa Gateway Raspberry Pi Hat is 8 channels LoRa gateway designed and developed for Raspberry Pi board. The cost is $32US plus $35.00US for the motherboard.   

There are a huge selection of soil moisture sensors for as low as $5.00.

I have sent sensor data to the IBM Cloud from a Sensor Tag. Below is a link to the project:

Clouds Happen

0

Comments

Contact Us

If you have any questions