Watch the French version of the video.
Predicting Frost Events
In 2013, 85% of the peach production in the Mendoza region (Argentina) was lost because of frost. Because less fruit was produced in the region, 600.000 less work days were needed to process the harvest between November 2013 and March 2014, a reduction in work force of 10.600 people. Across the Mendoza region, frost has caused a loss of revenue of 950 million Argentine pesos roughly 100 million USD in the peach business alone.
A frost event happens when the temperature is so low that the crops cannot recover their tissue or internal structure from the effects of water freezing inside or outside the plant. For the peach production, a critical period is when the trees are in bloom and fruit set (Aug./Sept. in Mendoza), during which the temperature needs to be kept above 3° C. Even a few hours below that temperature causes flowers to fall, preventing fruits to grow.
The goal of the project is to predict frost events in peach orchards by using dense monitoring using low-power wireless mesh networking technology. Off-the-shelf commercial solutions are available today which offer >99.999% end-to-end data reliability and a decade of battery lifetime.
We deploy low-power wireless mesh networks of temperature, relative humidity and soil moisture sensors directly into the orchard. We use machine learning and pattern recognition to build a micro-climate predictive model by continuously analyzing the gathered sensor data in real time, and issue early frost warnings. April Deployment, day 4
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…
April Deployment, day 3
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…
April Deployment, day 2
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.
April Deployment, day 1
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…
Hackathon at IETF95!
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!
Follow our April deployment!
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.
Backend server running!
The PEACH backend server is up and running! The server runs a Grafana frontend which shows sensor data and statistics in real-time for a 4-mote mock-up PEACH network running in the Inria-Paris premises. Look at the data in real time at http://sol.paris.inria.fr/!
Test network deployed!
A test PEACH network is now deployed on at Inria, in the EVA team’ offices! The network consists of: 2 raspberry Pi single board computers running the basestation software 2 SmartMesh IP managers, each connected to a raspberry Pi 4 SmartMesh IP motes deployed in 4 different offices
