The goal of this first deployment is to verify the full functionality of the low-power wireless network, without sensors attached (yet). The UDP and Inria teams visited the UTN team in Mendoza, Argentina, for this deployment.
15 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. It’s alive ! We started the day early to make sure everything worked fine at the end of the day. We were nicely rewarded by a wonderful view of the sunrise above the “pre-cordilleras”. As promised, the INTA team had installed 20 5m poles between…
14 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Another preparation day! Today we prepared the lasts boxes, bought battery packs, sold battery connectors, checked the motes configurations, improved the range testing scripts and lost a wallet. Great day! The VPN to the INTA local network is now working right and we can access…
13 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Today was testing day! We went to INTA Junin and met with Javier who nicely spent time with us explaining his work on frost and salt resistances with fruit trees. We performed several connectivity tests, outside and inside the orchards to get more insights about…
12 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Thomas and Diego left Mendoza yesterday to return to their respective labs. The local team is now following the work, starting by cutting wood in pieces, fixing those pieces onto the boxes and making sure they don’t move. Yes, those motes are being very agitated so…
11 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Today is the big deployment day! We are back at INTA Junin to deploy our sensor network. We have a grand total of 22 motes: 4 long-range prototypes, 2 motes with external antennas, and 16 motes with chip antennas. We started by running Keoma’s RangeTest SmartMesh SDK…
10 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Second day at the lab, and everything is starting to fall together! We reprogrammed all the motes with the default SmartMesh IP firmware, and configured each to report temperature every 30s. We are now done putting the motes, batteries and antennas in the boxes, and…
9 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. We are back at the UTN GridTICS lab for the week-end with three goals in mind: (1) finalize the code of the back-end system, (2) prepare the hardware, and (3) record some interviews for a video about the project.
8 April 2016, Mendoza, Argentina. Today, we went with the whole team to the INTA Junin experimental agricultural station to visit the orchard in which we will deploy our low-power wireless mesh network. We started by some presentations to highlight the problem we are addressing and the technology we are using. The orchard we…
7 April 2016, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The entire team is at the IETF95 meeting in Buenos Aires on 4-7 April 2016 for a Hackathon. We are doing a BUNCH of work, including finalizing the hardware integration, fine-tuning the back-end system, presenting the capabilities… and enjoying marvelous Buenos Aires!
Deploying a network is great fun. We invite you to follow our adventures, successes and mishaps on our web page, but also through twitter at @peachesthesave. We plan on publishing a blogpost and pictures on a daily basis.
