Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

Have you thought about sub Ghz mesh networking like 6lowpan with TI CC1310? If you don't need that much computing power then it's a good option, with way longer battery life.

Looks cool but I'm not sure how current those TI CC1310 devices are. I can see product release pages going back to 2015. Do you know anything about future support/availability for this model, or any newer models?

Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)

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