sensors

Old friends and new technological gardening

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.

Hello world… of sensors!

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.