IoT for Smart Farming — Connectivity
HELLO AGAIN
Part 3 of the IoT in Agriculture series! This week I’ll be covering how we managed to get well over a million points of agriculture data from 9 sites all over the UK to our servers over the sunny 2015 summer.
First, I have a confession. Communications were a part of the project that we didn’t give much thought to when we first set out. There seemed to be more excitement in choosing the overall sensor technologies and where (and how) we’d deploy them. There was certainly a bit of head scratching when we tried to figure out a reliable means of retrieving data.
Mesh networks have been all the rage for some time; they promise ease of use but at the potential expense of battery life (overall longevity) and potentially require more setup and debugging. Given time pressures to get nodes deployed and knowing we’d be using a mixture of sensor node technologies, debugging mesh networks wasn’t an option. Meshes nodes also need to connect to a base station at some point — that’s usually wired in but good luck finding an Ethernet port in a field.
TRIED AND TESTED — GPRS
Why GPRS? It perhaps isn’t the most energy efficient but it’s an established, reliable technology and one that we felt we could get results from almost right away (and we did). There are a ton of Arduino boards with integrated GPRS modules (like the Seeeduino GPRS) that are inexpensive and easy to start prototyping with.
From our initial tests, we were quickly confident that using GPRS would allow us to cut out the mesh-middle-men. Not having a clue how we work with the UK networks, we raided local convenience stores for their Pay As You Go (PAYG) SIMS. Whilst this worked for some quick prototyping, it quickly became a mess of differing Access Point Name (APN) configurations, lost web-portal logins, missing SIM cards and frustration. Also, in most cases you needed physical access to the SIM to add more credit.
ARKESSA TO THE RESCUE!
By chance, our CTO was introduced to Arkessa — a ‘connectivity solution’ company that essentially straddle all the main mobile networks and could provide the roaming connectivity we needed. This was vital as the reception among different networks was at best patchy in some of the valleys and remote farming locations we’d be covering. The roaming capability of the Arkessa connectivity service allowed the hardware to connect to the strongest network carrier in the locations we deployed the sensors. After doing a quick bench test with the kit, there was never an issue during deployment with coverage or connectivity once out in the field.
Gone were our APN and configuration problems — administering the ‘fleet’ of connected sensors was also super easy and at a negligible cost (approximately £1 per connection per month or so). Much easier than dealing with a bunch of PAYG cards! Having a single dashboard view through Arkessa’s EMPort connectivity management platform enabled us to monitor the status of the connections, set limits of usage, there was never the issue of worrying about a surprise bill. Also with the kit in remote rural location, it is always good to have the piece mind that a connection can be remotely deactivated.
AS EASY AS THAT?
GPRS isn’t a perfect solution as unfortunately we still have occasional dropouts (although it’s difficult to attribute these to issues with the network or with our hardware) but for ease of use and ‘time to deployment’, GPRS is ‘more than good enough’ and we’re happy to have found a great communications partner in Arkessa!
TO BE CONTINUED..
Next time, I’ll talk about a star of our Smart Agriculture trials — the Parrot Flower Power.
Want to learn more?
