Sunday, March 30, 2014

Agriculture and Industrial IoT

Think about a cow who shares her location as and when she moves. A twitter cow! She will inform you her where abouts and conditions :)




How cool is that! A very few of us will understand the problem of tracking cattle and animals! 
Let me give you an example to which most of us can relate, ladies what if when we open that big bag and we are looking for a lipstick , magically is starts shining. Finding stuff in a girl's bag can be so difficult. And we are talking about living animals who can wander wherever they want and you are tying to track them!


Tweeting Cow is no miracle , its a sensor band that is used for livestock monitoring. From monitoring the soil KPIs like moisture, chemical composition etc to using the trackers for asset management in the inventory. All these contribute to IoT. 

Lets look at what (or revisit) zigbee a little. Its a protocol (based on IEEE 802.15.4) to create a personal Area Network. The good thing is the low power consumption and the limitation is the range  ,its just upto 100m line of sight.

Its a low power , low cost , wireless mesh standards that supports both star and tree topologies.
Its used for controlling and monitoring the devices. The network must have a central node that coordinates.

Sometime IIOT is also looked at as IT + OT which means Information Technology + Operational Technology

One of the major challenges that IIOT and agriculture IOT is the current investments. Companies/firms have already done huge investments in their current infrastructure. It is going to be a challenge .
Its very difficult to convince anyone for the new huge investments, (most importantly getting rid of the old processes and assets).

This definitely is a big word in the industry. Lets see where we go with it.