My current venture brings together a couple of new technologies, at least new to me. I am currently working on a scientific project to help wineries to preserve water by watering the grapes only with as much water as necessary. To do this, we first need to learn about the soil and the moisture within. We then combine what we learned wit a rules based system to start watering plants when it is needed and stop watering when we have enough moisture in the soil.

So far for the use case. As wineries usually have large areas to cover and transmitting data is challenging and potentially expensive, we took a look at LoRaWAN and the respective sensor and gateways. What really amazed me was the state of open source in this segment - not only are LoRaWAN Server stacks open source (like the TTN stack), but also sensors and gateways.

This makes it convenient to get started to set up a demo environment and helps getting to good results. Here's our set up for the data gathering so far:

  • We started with our own entity of the "The Things Network (TTN) stack" on Docker
  • We added LoRaWAN Gateways from Dragino to it (Open Source HW)
  • We added Soil Moisture sensors to it (Dragino Open Source HW as well)
  • We added Web Hooks in the TTN Stack to write the data via REST APIs to a Domino Database
  • We added a sample react app to visualize the data:

This will help us now to monitor the incoming sensor data and to generate a soil profile for the next months. We will then find out about the right amount of water to balance the moisture content in the desired range using a Node Red based application to interpret the data and make LoRaWAN downlink calls to actors on the watering system.

We will then take the data up further and will work on an AI system to predict water consumption based on sensor data and weather forecast so we can measure plan data and actual consumption to meet the water consumption reduction goals the wineries came up with.

A great way to do something for the environment using technology. Also, I am very impressed about LoRaWAN and its capabilities - lots of opportunities ahead! So if you wnat to learn more about what we are doing - feel free to reach out!

Heiko.