4 ms·

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part. The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time. I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing. Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).

WillAdams 2y ago
The Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort of thing for a while --- check in with them? https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- cagenut 2y ago
  that website/project looks pretty dead
- tomhoward 2y ago
  I’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics). The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable. [1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.
  - gumby 2y ago
    In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi. (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)
    - tomhoward 2y ago
      Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years ago). I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone. I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
        BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks. It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.
        tomhoward 2y ago
        Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices. As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines). So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins. > Maybe talk to someone at Nordic Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.
schaefer 2y ago
If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake. See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.
  - gumby 2y ago
    Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      It seems much more labour intensive compared to drip irrigation that essentially run long hoses in each row. Can you command on this comparison?
cookiengineer 2y ago
This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?
- tomhoward 2y ago
  LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules). For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best. We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread. That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Are you not concerned about the battery life running edge ML on these chips? I imagine battery replacement will be a large part of the TCO for farmers. When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.
    - tomhoward 2y ago
      Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need. So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller. These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.
gumby 2y ago
I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the problem. So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.
  - hondo77 2y ago
    Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big. How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.
      - krisoft 2y ago
        > I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses. Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology. If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it? 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ
gumby 2y ago
$20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50. I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.
- gnuser 2y ago
  When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical application of scaling.

WillAdams 2y ago

The Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort of thing for a while --- check in with them? https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/

cagenut 2y ago
that website/project looks pretty dead
tomhoward 2y ago
I’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics). The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable. [1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.
- gumby 2y ago
  In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi. (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)
  - tomhoward 2y ago
    Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years ago). I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone. I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks. It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.
      - tomhoward 2y ago
        Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices. As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines). So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins. > Maybe talk to someone at Nordic Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.

schaefer 2y ago

If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake. See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge

declan_roberts 2y ago
Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.
- gumby 2y ago
  Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    It seems much more labour intensive compared to drip irrigation that essentially run long hoses in each row. Can you command on this comparison?

cookiengineer 2y ago

This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?

tomhoward 2y ago
LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules). For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best. We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread. That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Are you not concerned about the battery life running edge ML on these chips? I imagine battery replacement will be a large part of the TCO for farmers. When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.
  - tomhoward 2y ago
    Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need. So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller. These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.

gumby 2y ago

I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the problem. So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.
- hondo77 2y ago
  Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big. How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses. Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology. If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it? 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ

gumby 2y ago

$20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50. I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.

gnuser 2y ago
When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical application of scaling.