It’s safe to say it was an exciting end to 2017 with our first set of networking and sensor equipment arriving for VInOT just before the end of year break.
The hardware included:
* soil moisture sensors
* temperature sensors
* USB LoRa transceiver
* Raspberry Pi.
* Solar powered sensor station
This sensor and networking hardware will establish an end to end flow for data capture in the vineyard through to Big Query on the Google Cloud Platform. Additional sensors, actuators and third party data will be integrated in the coming months and provide the Artificial Intelligence and insights to VInOT.
The team have defined the initial architecture and spent time considering additional combinations and permutations of hardware, network and cloud platforms to be explored. The rapid advancements across all aspects of IOT will necessitate continual exploration and hands on experimentation. Brett Henderson (DigIO CTO) will take us through a more technical view of the implementation and the different hardware, network and cloud platforms options available in follow up posts.
We had our first field trip to one of the two trial vineyards and planned the location and number of sensors required to provide an indicative view on soil moisture for different vineyard blocks. While we were at it we took the opportunity to talk to a potato farmer to understand possible applications for their crop. Brett and I called it a field trip, others in the office called it an afternoon off !