A fitbit® for center pivot irrigation
A center-pivot irrigation system is a method of crop irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers. This is basically a 200m long pipe that rotates around a center point. The pipe has a lot of sprinklers, and as soon as the pivot is rotating it is irrigating the land below. These are well adopted worldwide.
Some months ago, one of our customers come to us with a new challenge, how can we monitor a pivot irrigation system without voiding the warranty?
Our first question was why? Why do you want to monitor it? What is important?
It looks like, these little beasts get stuck. Naturally, it is heavy machinery which can easily weigh more than 2 tons. So, as soon as the soil gets wet, the wheels get stuck, and this stops the system from spinning.
Generally, when the farmer finds it out is too late. One-half of the crops are over irrigated while the other half is dry.
Just in the USA, there are more than 125.000 pivot irrigation systems. Some of them have telemetry incorporated, but adding telemetry generally requires having the latest model of the pivot system, which is often not the case.
So our customer requirement made us ask ourselves, “How can we connect a pivot to the internet without touching it?”.
PIVOTSENSE
This is how we ended up manufacturing Pivotsense, our intelligent sensor for monitoring central pivot irrigation systems. For its installation, it only requires 2 minutes of work and a screwdriver. There is no need to connect it to the mainboard nor to the electricity. It is powered by solar energy.
Once it is installed, the user only needs to turn on the device, pushing the power button. Pivotsense will connect to the internet automatically, it will configure itself and it will start sending information to a cloud web dashboard where you can see statistics about your pivot in real-time!
What is more, it can be configured with alarms that inform if the irrigation device stopped moving or if the amount of irrigated water is below the needed level.
Now that we’ve been able to measure what’s going on with these giant irrigation machines by instrumenting them with autonomous solar-powered sensors, the next step is to merge the gathered data from the different variables regarding the pivot and create alerts and reports to obtain much better insights of the situation in the field, making the process much easier to manage for the farmers in charge of getting the best performance out of their irrigation system.
If you are interested in learning more about our products, feel free to drop me an email at sebastian@lessindustries.com or check out our website www.lessindustries.com
About LESS Industries
At LESS, we develop Industrial IoT solutions that, combined with AI, enable our clients to make better decisions. This will enable the customer to increase its operational efficiency, cost reductions, higher quality products, and competitiveness by giving them comprehensive real-time information about their processes and operations.
About Sebastian Cerone
I have been always convinced that sensing the world around us was a key concept in order to enable decision-makers to make better decisions, in real-time and remotely. Recently, due to the COVID, this concept quickly went from “key” to “critical”.
