Field-Ready IIoT Solution: Precision Animal Husbandry Enabled by Seeed’s SenseCAP LoRaWAN Hardwares and Machinechat’s JEDI One Software
In order to accelerate precision farming to maintain an optimal level of environmental conditions tailored to the growth and health of livestock in multiple housing sites, Seeed and Machinechat collaborated to make a ready-to-be-deployed IIoT solution, that measures, transfers, aggregates, and visualizes the real-time environmental data of temperature, humidity, light intensity, and air quality.
Solution: Precision Farming of Livestock
Targeted Industry Type: Animal Husbandry
Solution Partner(s): 
When it comes to the animal husbandry sector, maintaining an adequate growth environment is critical for the health of livestock. For example, maintaining regular periods of animal feed, preventing excessive water intake, and constantly monitoring the environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, light intensity, air quality) are fundamental prerequisites for animal health. However, it is nearly impossible to keep an accurate record of such volatile environmental factors by human efforts alone. This is why, the concept of “precision farming” has entered the realm of livestock farming, which is an emerging paradigm shift towards automating both “qualitative and qualitative” enhancements in the sector, by making use of smart sensors. Apparently, precision farming applied in the animal husbandry sector is increasingly gaining an importance for its cost-effectiveness, resource efficiency, and low-energy consumption features. (Kumar et al, 2021).
What’s the Challenge?
How to develop an affordable, easy-to-deploy and scalable solution for local farmers to wirelessly and securely monitor environmental conditions across multiple animal farms (Figure 1)?
Figure 1. IoT Solution for Animal Husbandry
ⓒ Machinechat
What’s the Solution?
A system integrator used Seeed’s IIoT devices – SenseCAP LoRaWAN sensors and gateway – that measures and transfers the data of temperature, humidity, light intensity, and air quality from a local server enabled by Machinechat’s software platform (JEDI One) and ChirpStack, in order to display the integrated data and monitor volatile environmental conditions of animal farms (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Seeed and Machinechat’s IIoT Solution Diagram
ⓒ Machinechat
Founded in 2018, Machinechat’s mission is to be the leading supplier of IoT data management solutions that dramatically accelerate and reduce the costs of developing and deploying IoT projects. Through leveraging software-defined networking principles, Machinechat’s easy-to-use and affordable solutions enable IoT solution architects, developers and networking OEMs to quickly add data collection, process streaming data, monitor data for data management, and incorporate such insights into their products and solutions.
What Are the Product Features?
SenseCAP LoRaWAN is a series of Seeed’s IIoT hardware products. Since it is based on LoRaWAN protocol Class A, the IoT devices are deployable worldwide with multiple ISM bands – EU868, US915, AU915, AS923. SenseCAP is encapsulated in an IP66 enclosure, making it applicable to remote sensing scenarios outdoors, like Smart Environmental Monitoring, Smart Farming, Smart City, and other countless IoT application scenarios that need low-power, long-distance, and long-term data collection features. By providing precise parameters, sensors assist service users to make accurate estimations and predictions of optimal product growth and quality. SenseCAP LoRaWAN devices can survive temperatures from -40℃ to +70℃ (up to 85℃ for SenseCAP sensors). Thanks to its high reliability, stability, long battery life spans, rapid installation and deployment, SenseCAP LoRaWAN products are used worldwide for a variety of industries.
Using JEDI One’s data collectors, system integrators can incorporate data collection, visualization and monitoring in hours. In addition, JEDI One’s drag-and-drop rules and notification features allow easy configuration. For instance, enabling and disabling real-time and scheduled alerts suitable for the type and life cycle needs of livestock being housed. Moreover, thanks to JEDI One’s local and customizable storage, integrated data can be securely segmented and exported as needed to local and cloud-based APPs (Figure 3).
Figure 3. JEDI One Software Platform at an Animal Farm
ⓒ Machinechat
What Are the Benefits?
This private-private partnership among Seeed Studio, Machinechat, Chirpstack, and Digi-Key will enable local farmers to:
- Reduce development and implementation costs with ready-to-use hardware and software fit for field deployment in the matter of days
- Monitor temperature, humidity, light, and air quality all-time
- Obtain real-time alerts and notifications to monitor and respond appropriately to changing environmental conditions
- Use the collected chronological data to optimize the health, growth, and ROI of animals and livestock
- Obtain standardized, robust, and industrial technologies for a wide range of indoor and outdoor precision farming applications
- Decrease recurring cloud processing costs
- Obtain enhanced data privacy and security
- Obtain updates for different needs of livestock at each lifecycle stage using JEDI One’s integrated and easy-to-configure dashboards, eliminating the need for costly on-going software customization
All in all, whoever you are – local farmers, innovators, makers, developers, or system integrators – you would be able to materialize your dream projects safely, rapidly, and cheaply by harnessing Seeed and Machinechat’s ready-made hardware and software tools. Feel free to connect with us by sending an email to [email protected] to consult about your next-generation IoT innovations. 🙂
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