AGRIWEISS ® Remote Sensing IoT Device for Agriculture in Australia – Collecting Soil Moisture and Temperature Data using Seeed Wio-E5 and Fusion PCBA
“In Australia, building an IoT application is a challenge.”
Said AGRIWEISS®. Especially when it comes to making an IoT device for agriculture, it is expected to have a network with both stable connection and wide reach, considering that the device needs to work within huge areas of land in remote areas. This article introduces the solution that AGRIWEISS® developed, using Seeed Wio-E5 and Fusion PCBA service to build an IoT agricultural device in Australia to measure soil data.
Why would AGRIWEISS® want to make such an IoT device?
AGRIWEISS® is a young, creative and ambitious software company, dedicated to developing technology for farmers, growers, irrigators and house plant owners, helping them to use data for sustainable management of cultivation.
AGRIWEISS® noticed that, in Australia, some farmers in rural and remote areas grow plants and crops over large areas of land, which is a hassle. But with a device that enables farmers to access data of the land via SMS and email, managing land and energy would become much more efficient without having to leave their homes. So they decided to build low-power remote monitoring soil sensors to provide measurable insights into soil moisture and temperature data.
Fields that the remote monitoring soil sensing device can be used:
- Monitoring crops in rural areas
- Home plant monitoring
- Forest monitoring
- Remote irrigation monitoring
Wio-E5 plays a key role in providing wide range communication at low power
In order to monitor over a large area and reduce energy consumption, AGRIWEISS chose Seeed Wio-E5 to add LoRaWAN® connectivity to the IoT device. Wio-E5 is the first SoC to combine a LoRa RFIC (SX126X) with an MCU (STM32WLE5JC) embedded on a single module. Designed with low energy but high performance, low cost and compact applications in mind, the FCC and CE certified Wio-E5 LoRaWAN® module is ideal for long-distance, ultra-low-power applications such as smart agriculture, smart city, sensor networks, wireless communication, and other low-power wide-area IoT scenarios.
The AGRIWEISS® LoRaWan® LoRa E5 development board hosts Wio-E5 and Seeed XIAO SAMD21 and the soil moisture and temperature data is transmitted wirelessly to an Arduino MKR 1500 receiver through LoRaWAN® and Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking.
With a Thingstream sim card, the Arduino MKR 1500 board performs IoT LTE cellular communication. The Grove-Wio-E5 on the hub receives data from the transmitter and publishes it to Thingstream, and then Thingstream sends the notification via SMS or email.
When we interviewed AGRIWEISS about the Seeed Fusion PCBA service, Chilumba, the Chief Technology of AGRIWEISS, kindly share his feelings:
“Our development board is manufactured by Seeedstudio who has a wonderful team and great customer service – they provided us with Design for manufacturing checks to ensure our design was the appropriate standard for manufacturing. If you are looking to manufacture good quality products look no further than Seeedstudio PCBA.”
If you have any interesting concept for the Wio-E5 and would like to share it with the community, please share it with us! We can help you make it a reality with Seeed Fusion’s turnkey PCB Assembly capabilities.
In addition, if you select components from the Seeed PCBA Open Parts Library (OPL), you can reduce the lead time to only 7 business days. And for batch production, you can get the Wio-E5 module for only $7.90 (28% off the original price of $10.90) when you manufacture with the Seeed Fusion PCB assembly service.
Attracted a plenty of attention after the device launched
As long as the Remote Sensing IoT Device for Agriculture has been launched, AGRIWEISS gets a huge number of website visits, with Seeed’s promotion on SNS. The most exciting thing is that the main traffic is from Australia, which means this device is truly viable in Australia. What’s more, Chilumba said they were encouraged by a message expressing the expectation of the project:
“The article has been very popular, but we didn’t expect the amount of engagement that we have gotten. We had 200 website visits in less than 24hrs, users from all over the world. And we had one message from someone who would like to see us complete the project – this is encouraging as it shows us our innovation and experimental mindset towards tech is valid.”
Get Wio-E5 project Manufactured for Free with Seeed Fusion PCB Assembly Service!
To facilitate the improvement of the IoT industry to the next level, Seeed is offering Fusion PCB assembly services to all hardware enthusiasts, designers, manufacturers and engineers worldwide by offering 100% sponsorship of the Wio-E5 project!
Good ideas need to be discovered and good projects deserve to be recognized, realized and propagated. You can get your completely FREE boards for one design, up to two PCBA boards per person, including PCB fabrication, component costs, assembly and shipping. The design must include Wio-E5.
Come and join us!
About Author
Looking for the top PS4 DNS servers? You have arrived to the correct location. Consider reading this post to understand more about the PS4 DNS servers and the configuration process.
Hello, and thanks for this guide! I was wondering if it would be hard to add some kind of water level sensor. Have you thought of anything? I need to keep an eye on how much water is in a small well. Many thanks!
Many thanks for your intesest! This idea is feasible. For more information, pls contact [email protected] for an inquiry.