Leader in Integrated ICT Hardware & Systems
Mariusz Wilk, PhD student, Wireless Sensor Network Group and Alan Mathewson, Deputy Director of CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks will be on “Big Week on the Farm” at 7pm on RTE One. In this week’s episode Mariusz will be deploying his soil monitoring sensors in Shalvey dairy farm, Cootehill, Co. Cavan.
The state of the Smart Farm is continuously monitored. Regular updates are published via an automated Twitter machine which reports the conditions in real time. As well as that, occasional tweets are generated when certain events took place, e.g. when temperature crosses certain thresholds. These twitter updates are used to show how an IoT system can react to information from the sensor data
Agriculture and food constitute a hugely significant element of the Irish economy in terms of jobs and exports, and its long-term competitiveness and sustainability is a priority concern of national policy. The continuous development and application of new knowledge and new technologies is crucial to the realisation of national policy objectives for the sector. Agriculture is a very important industry worldwide. The world has an ever growing population placing a demand for increased yield in food production to provide for this growth. Productivity enhancement through nanotechnology-driven
precision farming and maximization of output and minimization of inputs through better monitoring and targeted action is desirable for economic and environmental reasons. This paper demonstrates a complete IoT enabled agricultural eco system to enable precision management of resources in an agricultural setting.
Incorporating remote sensing, actuation and control capability, it shows how a typical IoT system works in practice, on an example of a “Smart Farm” that is connected to the internet. The data is collected by various sensor technologies. It is aggregated and pre-processed in a microcontroller that transmits it using a low-power radio module to a nearby gateway for local processing and data analysis and actuation implementation. The gateway relays the information to a back-end cloud system that stores, processes and presents the collected information to enable visualisation of the data sets and cloud based analytics of the status of the Smart Farm.
Alan and Mariusz are part of the CONNECT team at Tyndall National Institute. Their project used the Pervasive Nation Internet of Things network which is operated by CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks