42 Technology helps develop smarter monitoring for remote Australian farms

42 Technology helped Australian IoT company, Titan Class, to develop a faster and easier way to roll out its smart agricultural monitoring systems to some very remote farms. All without farmers needing to install costly infrastructure such as gateway antennae.

The approach has been trialled using soil moisture probes but it can be used for any farm monitoring or actuation task including monitoring weather, water trough levels, fuel tanks or the status of electric fences.

The technology

The new NB-IoT enabled solution uses existing off-the-shelf agricultural sensors combined with a Rust programming language application on a Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 SiP device, to transmit small LoRaWAN-style packets of sensor data to the network.

As a result, Titan Class has reduced the transmission costs to send real-time data via the cellular network by a factor of 100:1. This means lower network charges and allowing the system to handle many more sensors than ever before.

Titan Class and 42 Technology have worked together to develop a new NB-IoT enabled approach. The technology means it can be used for any farm monitoring or actuation task in remote locations. Image credit: Titan Class.

Although Australia has high NB-IoT network coverage, one of the challenges is that a sensor in a field could be up to 20km from the nearest base station. As it’s almost impossible to maintain full duplex cellular communications across those distances, NB-IoT can instead be used to ‘fire and forget’.

This contrasts markedly with the MQTT over TLS set-up used by most agricultural sensors where the full-duplex nature means they have to use the LTE-M network. This usually results in unnecessarily high network charges. This is because the MQTT protocol has a relatively high overhead both for connection set-up and for each packet of data sent.

What our client said

Farmers tell us they’re typically paying around $50 per month in network charges per device. Whereas our initial trials suggest we can reduce this to around $0.58 by sending LoRaWAN packets over UDP. Our approach is also more robust and reliable because we’re getting a much higher range and penetration from NB-IoT compared with the LTE-M network.

42T’s role in the project included improving support for the nRF9160 within the existing Embedded Rust ‘nrf-hal’ project. Also, updating its own Rust-language open-source interface to the Nordic modem to use the latest version of Nordic’s libraries.

The Rust programming language set out to offer a more productive way to build high-performance, reliable software. It’s now widely used in back-end systems with all the major tech companies investing heavily and reporting big successes with their roll-outs.

This support is also starting to be seen in the Embedded Rust space too. The combination of high-performance code with a focus on security and reliability means it’s ideal for applications such as this NB-IoT based agricultural monitoring system.

If your company is looking for experts to assist with a technology for your particular application, please get in touch by emailing answers@42t.com.

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