devices

Old friends and new technological gardening

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smart gardeningI have a friend who spends whole days working at his garden. He often changes the position of his bushes and stones, sometimes he adds a tree and I don’t know what else. As a gardening-addicted he’s considering to buy some smart soil probes and put them in some strategic spots. He’d love to check them when he is far from his beloved plants.

Geographical maps are not so detailed for his garden and of course they don’t update at every relocation of his plants. So he needs an approximate drawing of his garden and virtually set the position of his probes on it.

I suggested him to have a look at Sensorbis. He could do all that by uploading a plan of his garden and adding his probes as a federation of devices. Sending data in a simple format, humidity and pH rates can be displayed on the plan in real-time. He could also see a real-time chart or a historical chart of his probes’ data, calculate, for example, an average and also save those data for some nostalgic days.

That’s just a little example of the opportunities offered by IoT systems in gardening or in agriculture.
There are IoT sensors to measure temperature, humidity, wind, rain, sunlight, soil nutrients, plant growth, fruit ripening. Using data collected by those sensors, IoT devices can control automatic irrigation, nutrients feeding, shielding from hailstorms and so on.

Those new technologies allow, for example, to grow plants where water is very scarce, calculating the exact amount needed to save it as much as possible. That is of vital importance for people living in such disadvantaged areas.

And after harvesting, IoT systems are involved in the subsequent phases of processing, preservation and delivery.

IoT systems automate and fine tune many aspect of production, reducing effort, resources usage and energy consumption while increasing yield and quality of the crops.

How to visualize your IoT infrastructure?

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telemetry tracking on mapsAn IoT infrastructure is composed of a set devices that could be located in a room, like socket consumption meters, or spread through the planet, like oceanographic buoys. Such devices could also change their location over time, like vehicles.

Displaying your devices at their location can greatly help to have an overall view of the situation and immediately identify a device much faster than an identification number or a textual description. Depending on the purpose and on the physical area covered by your set of devices, you could display them on a geographical map (e.g. marine buoys or vehicles) or over a plan (e.g. domestic power consumption meters or machinery in a factory).

Sensorbis allows using a geographical map or a user-provided plan or image to visualize real-time position and telemetry data of your devices. If a device is static, you can set its coordinates in the device properties, while, if it can move, you can use coordinates provided by the device itself. Users can choose to view a track of the last positions of a device.

Coordinates are typically acquired using GPS, but any sort of custom positioning is fine, e.g. those calculated by indoor smart cleaning robots. All you need to do is specifying the coordinate channels of your device. If you use a custom plan, you can set its physical height and width to match the device measurements.

A deeper insight of the telemetry data is provided through charts with selectable period range, data coarseness and statistical indicators.

Let’s consider the case of robots that move on rails inside a factory. Those robots could be programmed to calculate their location on the track and thus inside the building. They could wirelessly send the position at regular intervals. By uploading a plan of the factory in the system, it is possible to follow the movement of the robots in real-time. And, by clicking on one of them, it would possible to view its battery level, the weight of its load, and so on. Those information can be expanded on a dedicated chart for a more detailed view over time.

Hello world… of sensors!

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world of sensors Sensorbis comes from the words “sensor” and “orbis” that means “world” in Latin.

This new system comes from the idea of easing the management of generic Internet-connected devices and their telemetry.

Collecting and using telemetry data from a set of devices may require a considerable effort. You have to maintain the list of your devices with their sensors and their features, acquire and reliably store telemetry, visualize data, produce reports, share the information with your colleagues or hobby friends and so on.

Sensorbis uses a reliable underlying cloud system to provide everything is necessary to ingest, store and use telemetry data. Acquired data can be displayed on charts, maps or user provided images or plans and downloaded for further analysis. The system allows real-time data visualization for all the types of visualizations.

The hierarchical list of devices, sensors and channels is easy to maintain and use. Everything can be operated by the dedicated web application. To automate most of the operations, a simple programming interface (API) is also provided.

The system is suitable for static or moving devices with unlimited scenarios. It can be used to track vehicles, robots, and people or to monitor home automation systems, factory machinery, agricultural systems, wheater, pollution, noise and everything that is measurable, ranging from a single device to a large Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure.

Users can share data and views with other users and decide which privileges to grant them, thus enabling collaboration with colleagues or friends.

Telemetry data are securely sent as simple XML packets over HTTPS protocol. You just need to register the device with his sensors and data channels in the system and then send the telemetry packets to a given url along with a provided authorization token. There are no requirements about hardware or communication technology.

You can create a free account.