What are the essential elements for mushroom monitoring with Valarm Tools Cloud?
We’ve had a number of Industrial IoT customers request real-time data on the important factors of mushroom farming. Since we prides ourselves on our slogan, “Monitoring Anything Anywhere”, we figured we’d put together a write-up on how this can be done using off-the-shelf hardware and Valarm Tools Cloud – Tools.Valarm.net.
Excellent mushroom farming requires a controlled environment for at least these factors:
Mushroom development falls into a number of stages. Each stage requires quite strict measurements of temperature and humidity. And a close watch on the air quality, i.e., CO2 / Carbon Dioxide. In each stage, monitoring can be simplified by using off the shelf components with Valarm Tools Cloud.
Temperature and humidity, can be easily monitored using the Yocto Meteo sensor. The Yocto Meteo is a reliable sensor that monitors 3 factors in 1 module (Temperature & Humidity & Barometric Pressure). The Meteo sensor transmits sensor information to Tools.Valarm.net when it is connected to a sensor hub via a Micro to Micro USB cable. - CO2 is easily monitored using a Yocto CO2 sensor. The standard version of this sensor can measure up to 10,000 ppm (vol), or 1%. The same device can be built with a 30,000 ppm sensor (3%) on demand. Furthermore there’s also a 300,000 version (30%). Just like the Meteo sensor, the CO2 sensor connects to a transmission hub via a Micro to Micro USB cable. Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us if you have any questions!
You’ll need a sensor hub device to transmit your data to Valarm Tools Cloud. This device often is a Yoctopuce Wifi sensor hub. You can also use a Yoctopuce Ethernet hub, or a Yoctopuce GSM 3G or GPRS 2G hub that connects to Tools.Valarm.net via any mobile cell network SIM card.
You may also need sensor data translators / adapters for the various sensors that output raw signals that require interpretation by sensor hubs. For example, a 0-10V sensor adapter with a Decagon soil moisture sensor or a Serial sensor adapter integrated with a soil temperature + soil moisture sensor. You can also add GPS / GNSS sensors for GPS-tagging all of your sensor data on a 2D or 3D map with latitude / longitude coordinates! Here are a few more sensor standards you can use with Tools.Valarm.net:
4-20mA sensor adapters for monitoring sensors for things like water levels, fluid volumes, tank product quantities, radar and ultrasonic level sensors- PWM / Pulse Width Modulation sensor adapters for Industrial IoT telemetry of flow meters, pumps, water usage, rates and RPMs on stationary and mobile assets like fleet vehicles, trucks, and trailers loaded with industrial equipment like tanks, vacuums, and pumps!
- 0-5 Volt or 0-10V sensors for raw Alphasense air quality sensors like O3 / Ozone, NO2 / Nitrogen Dioxide, H2S / Hydrogen Sulfide, SO2 / Sulfur Dioxide, NOx / Nitrogen Oxides
- Serial TTL UART sensors for water quality, pH, conductivity, salinity, Total Dissolved Solids / TDS
- RS-485 Modbus
- milliVolts / mV
- Potentiometers, Electrical resistance, Switches, Knobs
- RS-232 Serial to connect to tons of things like Campbell Scientific dataloggers and Vaisala sensors for weather and wild fire fuel moisture risk, and Geokon piezometers / pressure transducers
- SPI / Serial Peripheral Interface Bus for connecting to air quality sensors like the Alphasense OPC-N2, Optical Particle Counters for measuring Particulate Matter – PM1, PM2.5, and PM10.
Note that some sensors connect directly via Micro USB cables to your sensor hubs like the meteo, temperature, humidity, light, and CO2 sensors in this ‘shroom scenario.
As a final component of the hardware you’ll need enclosures for the Hub, the adapters and the overall system. You can get creative with these or purchase most of them from our online store at Shop.Valarm.net.
Now for the fun part!
Connect all your sensors to your sensor hubs.
Configure your sensor hubs to speak to Tools.Valarm.net. This tutorial will assist you in the configuration. Once your sensor hub devices are communicating withTools.Valarm.net, then map the sensors to their data output columns / fields as detailed in the step-by-step HowTo video tutorial.
Deploy the sensors into their appropriate settings for your deployment scenario. A Meteo sensor should sit at a reasonable distance near the mushrooms in order to monitor humidity and temperature appropriately. Finally power the system and watch your data stream into the cloud.
On Valarm Tools Cloud you can map your sensor data for geographic visualization on 2D and 3D Earth Globe Maps. You can set up e-mail alerting based on thresholds that are met or exceeded by your sensors, as well as SMS / text message alerts. You can get all of your GPS-tagged sensor data onto a dashboard that displays easily readable gauges and charts for further analysis. Store and analyze your data for predictive growing patterns. You and your organization can really monitor anything, anywhere!
There you have it. Real-time monitoring systems that take less than 2 hours from start to finish to get into the field. Rapidly deployable and flexible Industrial IoT solutions. For ‘shrooms, air quality, water, fluids, vehicles, trucks, and trailers with industrial equipment like pumps, tanks, and vacuums, literally anything, anywhere!
If you are assembling a system like these and need any help or recommendations, then please feel free to Contact Us at Info@Valarm.net. Once you’ve got your system up and running, then send us pictures of your real-time monitoring! Have a look at our Remote Sensor Monitoring, Telemetry, and Industrial IoT Customer Stories on this page for more examples of real world remote monitoring.
