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Design, Development and Evaluation of an Open Source Gateway for the SmartFarm Decision Support System.

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  2018 ASABE Annual International Meeting  1800465.(doi:10.13031/aim.201800465)
Authors:   Caleb Fink, Bo Liu, Fletcher Easton, Chandra Krintz, Rich Wolski, Balaji Sethuramasamyraja
Keywords:   Almonds, Cloud Computing, Decision Support, Gateway, Open Source, Precision Agriculture

Abstract. The purpose of this research is to design, develop and evaluate an open source gateway for the SmartFarm open source decision support system in improving agricultural stewardship, environmental conservation, and providing a system that is solely owned by the farmer. There are very limited options for an open source gateway for collecting on farm data that the farmer owns and sending it to the cloud. The options available are: expensive, require professional maintenance, are not portable between systems, improvements are made only by the manufacturer, limited in customization options, difficult to operate, and data is owned by the company rather than the farmer. The gateway is designed to send data to the cloud from remote SmartFarm Data Acquisition (DAQ) nodes, collect measurement data from remote SmartFarm DAQ nodes, provide a means of wirelessly programming remote SmartFarm DAQ nodes, and a tool that provides data analysis and insight from remote SmartFarm DAQ nodes. It is evaluated to work with 900MHz radios, SmartFarm DAQ nodes, and costs $35. Its setup takes 4 steps and ~20 minutes installation time, does not require maintenance, can utilize Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless protocols, and software can port to other systems. The method of evaluation is quantitative. The gateway measured for data rate of 93.4Mbit/s internet upload speed, passing a range of 252 to 1592 bytes of data from a remote node to the cloud, consumes 2.8 Watts, software efficiency is 25% CPU usage, measurement efficiency is 1 message every 15 seconds, data analysis can be accomplished with the cloud service tool, and it can wirelessly program remote DAQ nodes.

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