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.
Here’s mechanical harvester MH108 with the Valarm Pro app running on a Samsung Galaxy S3 inside the weatherproof orange box. The white piece on the left of the box (for breathability) was custom made with our 3D printer!
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
This is the control panel on the harvesters, a lot of switches and knobs. We used the Valarm Pro app on an Android phone + sensors to connect to a variety of factors and map it in real-time with a high accuracy GPS!
You can see Pawel and Zo in the control panel box hooking up wires to sensors and verifying the Android device with the Valarm Pro app is reading the current sensor values.
Giant wine grape harvester parked in the garage and ready to be put in the clouds with Valarm! Good times driving these harvesters around for testing and installation.
Beautiful Scheid vineyards in the San Lucas region of Monterey County, California.
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.
