How do you put a decades old wine grape harvester into the cloud?
Some people think that the Internet of Things (IoT) means your dog or your toaster have an IP address and are accessible on the internet. This is all well and good, but what if the “thing” you want to put on the internet is a valuable harvesting tractor machine? Now what?
Well, during the 2014 harvest season, Scheid Vineyards asked us to help them wire up their AGH (American Grape Harvesters) Quantum Harvesters, doing telemetry and what’s also known as precision agriculture.
Scheid vineyards wanted to know when and where:
- The machine is turned on and off
- The gondola light is indicating a full load of grapes has been harvested, meaning it needs to be changed for an empty gondola
- Fans / blowers turned on and off
- Conveyor belts turned on and off
- Shaker head turned on and off
Plus:
- How fast the shaker head is moving
- How fast the machine itself is moving
In the next blog entries we’ll talk about challenges we encountered and how we overcame them. Here’s a write-up on the mapping and GIS components of this precision agriculture deployment.