Hey everyone! Here is a project that my friend and I have worked on for the past month or so!
FarmShield directly addresses the difficulty of monitoring remote environmental and water parameters across large farms and protected areas where manual inspection is costly in fuel, labour and time as well as being slow to detect failures that directly affect animal welfare. Existing solutions that attempt to address this problem commonly rely on cellular connectivity, internet infrastructure and recurring subscription fees, which heavily limit their applicability. Thus, FarmShield aims to remove all of those dependencies to provide a low-cost, autonomous and subscription-free monitoring network. The proposed design is based on a distributed sensor network and a central base station. Each sensor node is battery powered and solar recharged whilst having the ability to measure parameters such as water level, turbidity, water temperature, humidity and pressure. These measurements are then relayed back through the private multi-hop LoRa mesh network. This multi-hop architecture allows the range to be extended significantly whilst providing redundancy in the event that a node becomes unreachable or disconnected. Overall the system is designed to reduce any forms of manual intervention while all data processing and display of data remains local to the base station.
We designed and tested everything ourselves. A cool few things that I would like to add is that we used a MPPT (Maximum Power point tracker) for our solar panel such that we can always
be getting the maximum power out of our panel. We also utilised a low-power architecture on the ESP32's to minimise power consumption when the modules aren't transmitting data aswell. (Note that the images added were taken from my final report that I wrote)
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