Atomata - IoT Agriculture
As a startup out of DU, Atomata had roots deep in the Innovation Labs in which I work and spend a lot of my time as a student. Getting in contact with them was easy, and I soon became a productive team member, leading the charge of the hardware development so that founder and electrical engineer Isaiah could focus more on the sales. Here is an overview of some of the projects I have done. All of these projects are centered around a fully integrated series of sensors that collect data on environmental conditions and the related plant growth associated with those conditions.
main hub - Wifi connectivity
If you have an Amazon Alexa in your home, try and remember setting it up and integrating it with your WiFi. You probably can’t. The reason is that Amazon made it so darn easy to connect this device to your home, that there are rarely issues to take note of during this setup. Every WiFi reliant device should be like this and ours was no exception. Using a WiFi module, we were able to set up our hub to act as an Access Point, allowing users to enter their credentials. From here, the device would automatically store these credentials on board and use them to log on to the WiFi in case connection is lost at any point. This makes it very easy for users to implement this device with a very simple instruction set that comes along with the device.
Root module - battery life
It’s great having a main hub that can connect to the system, but we also needed some peripheral sensors to take measurements that don’t necessarily need to be plugged in to the main hub. One of these sensors is the soil moisture sensor and the module that accompanies this. The minimum viable root sensor product could only last for a few weeks on a fairly large battery; the sensors, bluetooth module (to send data back to the main hub), and microcrontroller (that facilitated this data transfer) simply pulled too much power from the battery all the time. To fix this, I had to make a few hardware modifications to the microcontroller, a few hardware additions to the overall circuit (ensuring that unnecessary devices get cut off when not needed), and played with the software, ensuring that every possible part of the chips in use were turning off.
When it was all said and done, I had improved the battery life of this module from 2 weeks on a fairly large battery to over a year on just AA batteries that will be easy to change out by the user.
weather station
Atomata made a recent pivot to take advantage of a large customer’s needs. We started to look at how we could apply technology we were already using to outdoor grows and asset tracking between farms. Turns out, a lot of what we had already learned could be applied to our new project - outdoor weather stations. These would not be able to communicate via WiFi (they need more range!) and some of the sensors are irrelevant - soil moisture in one tiny spot of a field is not as significant as soil moisture of your uniform, level garden at home might be.
Through this project, I learned a lot about how to implement the following:
3g cellular communication and pub/sub protocols
wind speed/direction (anemometers) and rainfall sensors
Full spectrum and UV Spectrometers
It has been a really fun project, and I can’t wait until they are finalized and out in the fields, providing this data at about 10% the cost of any weather stations on the market.