Description

As farmers our applications are critical so we spend a lot of  time ensuring that the plants we grow and the animals we raise are alive and healthy. We struggled a lot to visualize and automate our farming processes using the existing diy hardware and software due to the level of reliability required (keeping animals alive), the diversity of our needs (chickens, fish, bees, plants, water wells etc), as well as the remote nature of our applications (our farms are in different locations). Everything required different micro-controllers, as well as different shields, as well as different programming – resulting to reliability, scalability and development headaches.

We designed the V2 Smart Controller to overcome all the issues faced notably:

• flexibility – multiple applications, multiple sensors, multiple actuators using same hardware and software
• reliability – 2 microcomputers, 3 hardware watchdogs, communications and multiple shields all on one board
• development cycles – easy to use full stack IoT software suite and API’s

The v2 Smart Controller and platform allowed us to successfully integrate remote system control, data acquisition, alerting and visualization into our farming applications easily.

The v2 smart controller integrates an ar9331 linux microcomputer, an arduino mega 2560 micro-controller, sensor interface circuits, actuator driver circuits, communications and other utility(eg watchdogs, real-time clock) circuits all on same the board. A more detailed hardware specification listing is shown below:

What really makes the v2 controller easy to use is the onboard as well as remote IoT full stack software platform features. Some of these are shown below: