CLIEncoders · Industries
Agritech engineering and precision farming systems
Agricultural hardware is buried, rained on, driven over and left alone for a season. The engineering problem is survival and power far more than it is software.
The environment is the specification
A soil probe is installed once and expected to work through a growing season without a visit. Nothing about that is a software problem: it is sealing, connector choice, condensation management and the fact that moisture will find any weakness given months to work on it.
In our experience of environmental deployments the failure is almost never the microcontroller. It is a connector that corroded, a gland that let water in, or a battery that behaved differently at 2°C than it did on the bench. We design against those first because they are what actually ends deployments.
Power and range, together
Fields are large and have no power. That pushes hard toward LoRaWAN, which gives kilometres of range at data rates that suit a sensor reporting every fifteen minutes, and toward a power budget where the radio is the dominant cost and everything is designed around minimising its airtime.
Solar with a properly sized buffer often makes sense, but it needs designing for the worst week of the year rather than the average — the whole point is not visiting the site.
Control, and the risk of it
Irrigation control is where a system stops observing and starts acting, and where a bug costs a crop. Valve control gets local fail-safe logic that does the right thing when the network is gone, hard limits that no remote command can override, and a manual override that always works.
Above that: scheduling, weather-data integration, and dashboards designed to be read on a phone in bright sunlight by someone standing in a field, which is a genuine and frequently ignored design constraint.
Questions
What people ask before starting
How long will a battery-powered sensor last?
It is set almost entirely by how often it transmits, not by how often it measures — the radio dominates the budget. Reporting every fifteen minutes and reporting hourly give very different answers. We model this against your required reporting interval and target lifetime early, because it drives battery size, enclosure size and cost together.
Which sensors do you support?
Most things with a documented electrical interface: soil moisture and temperature, EC, pH, weather stations, flow meters, tank levels. Where a sensor's accuracy claim matters to your decisions, we would want to validate it against a reference rather than trust the datasheet — the gap between the two is often the interesting part.
Does it work without internet at the farm?
Yes. A local gateway can run scheduling and control autonomously and sync when connectivity is available, which for irrigation is the right architecture regardless — you do not want watering to depend on an uplink being up.
Can we start small and expand?
Yes, and you should. A handful of nodes on one field for a season teaches you more than any specification exercise, particularly about what the data is actually worth to you. We design the addressing and provisioning so scaling up later does not mean starting again.
Related
Where this usually connects
Tell us what you are building
One technical call is usually enough to tell you whether this is straightforward, genuinely hard, or the wrong approach entirely. We would rather say so early than quote for the wrong thing.
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