Remote - Fall 2012 - (Page 26)

Applications - Feature Wireless Sensors and Cloud Platform Provides Real-Time Vineyard Environmental Monitoring Todd Nordblom, MicroStrain, Inc. Jake Galbreath, MicroStrain, Inc. The cultivation and harvesting of wine grapes is highly influenced by localized environmental conditions. These conditions are variable over short distances, making their monitoring both difficult and time consuming. Practices such as irrigation and spraying depend on the cumulative exposure of plants to a variety of elements. Without access to accurate, reliable field data, farmers risk the health of their crop and the effectiveness of their resources and labor. MicroStrain worked with Shelburne Vineyard, a northern Vermont winery, to implement a remote monitoring solution with wireless environmental sensors. The solution enabled cloud-based, real-time monitoring of vineyard conditions across multiple locations, and allowed vineyard employees to remotely view and track conditions and respond to events. The deployed sensor network provided Shelburne Vineyard with means to create alerts to notify growers when significant environmental thresholds are met. Furthermore, the scalable network is capable of proactively monitoring all the vineyard’s plant varieties and providing the necessary platform to enable condition based cultivation and harvesting. One wine that especially benefits from close monitoring is ice wine. Derived from winter hardy grapes, ice wine harvests are extremely sensitive to low temperature. The grapes are left on the vine late into the season to allow for longer development of their sugar. Harvest takes place soon after the ambient temperature drops to 17.6°F (-8°C). Temperature differences of only a few degrees significantly affect Figure 1 - Vermont’s springtime and autumn cold the condition of harvested grapes. snaps can harm the delicate buds and vines. By using a wireless monitoring system, Shelburne Vineyard knows the precise time and location a condition threshold is triggered. Furthermore, Shelburne Vineyard uses this technology to monitor vineyards throughout spring frosts scares (Figure 1), summer droughts and long-term soil health. The web-based data management and visualization platformprovides convenient access to real-time information as well as a useful tool for organizing historical information. Conventional techniques for monitoring the environmental conditions of agriculture lack the scale and user interface necessary for many applications. Traditional weather station monitoring systems in use are typically limited to a single point of measurement. The corresponding localized data is relevant, but does not capture variations in environmental conditions that exist across an entire vineyard. Deployment of multiple stations is often prevented given system cost, which start around $5,000 per location. Methods for transferring and visualizing data from weather stations contribute additional costs and labor practices such as manual recording, downloading recorded data to a PC, or running hard wire transmission. As a result, many vineyards under-utilize automated environmental monitoring techniques or rely entirely on their own, custom solutions to provide feedback related to the condition of their crop. Before MicroStrain, Shelburne Vineyard relied on a simple min-max thermometer with manual reset to record and track temperature data. By this method, the vineyard founder compiled records and judged current grape conditions. Measurements included summer highs and winter lows, the last frost date in the spring and the first frost in the fall. When the founder travelled or was simply too busy to reset the device it resulted in the loss of event information. Adding sensor capabilities or locations corresponded to a proportional increase in time commitment. 26 www.RemoteMagazine.com A combination of geographical features and plant varieties used by Shelburne Vineyard make it especially susceptible to fluctuations in environmental conditions. MicroStrain’s project with Shelburne Vineyard focused on monitoring the environmental conditions in two remote locations. The company’s ENV-Link wireless sensor was used to perform measurements. System Description Figure 2. ENV-Link Wireless Environmental Sensor Block Diagram Each ENV-Link featured calibrated sensors for measuring ambient air temperature, relative humidity, soil moisture, leaf wetness and solar radiation. Though not specifically used in this application, the ENV-Link is also capable of monitoring rain flow, barometric pressure, conductivity, wind speed, wind direction, as well as high-accuracy contact and non-contact temperature measurements using RTDs and thermocouples. The key to the ENV-Link’s input versatility is the use of two self-calibrating, high precision 24-bit sigma delta A/D converters, as shown in Figure 2. 24-bit resolution provides high sensitivity and resolution for mV scale outputs common to many environmental sensors, while maintaining broad dynamic range for voltage input flexibility. For applications requiring diverse voltage inputs, the two separate A/D converters can be configured at different gain settings to accommodate both mV scale inputs as well as higher full scale voltage inputs (0 to 3 V, 0 to 5 V and 0 to 10 V .) The ENV-link wireless sensors were mounted to posts at their designated vineyard sites, as shown in Figure 2. The ENV-Link uses a 2.4 GHZ IEEE 802.15.4 radio with programmable transmit output power from 1 mW to 100 mW, providing communication distances up to 2 km line-of-sight. In this application the ENV-Links were deployed 1 km away from a WSDA1000 wireless sensor gateway, which was installed in a nearby barn. The WSDA-1000 is a miniature ruggedized single board computer running Linux, with an Intel 600 MHz XScale processor and 2GB of flash memory. It is designed to aggregate and synchronize data from one or many wireless sensor nodes, storing data locally while also providing the option to publish data securely to the cloud. Remote internet connectivity was provided by a Sierra Wireless Raven-X cellular modem, which was connected directly to the Ethernet interface of the WSDA-1000. The WSDA-1000 wireless sensor gateway was configured to securely upload sensor data at two minute intervals to MicroStrain’s remote data collection platform SensorCloud. Built on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, SensorCloud is a unique sensor data storage, visualization and remote management platform that leverages powerful cloud computing technologies to provide data scalability, rapid visualization and user programmable analysis. Security http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - Fall 2012

Remote - Fall 2012
Contents
Editor's Choice
New Opportunities in a Wireless World
Why Land-lines May Still be the Best Option for Your Remote Monitoring Network
SCADA Systems – The Best Choice For Water and Wastewater Remote Monitoring
M2M: Why Remote Monitoring Matters
SCADA
Networking
ZigBee Resource Guide
Security
Onsite Power
Enclosures
Environmental Monitoring
Naval Security and Energy Initiatives: Taking Control
Wireless Sensors and Cloud Platform Provides Real-Time Vineyard Environmental Monitoring
Industry News
Simulcast Expands Channel Availability and Cuts Expenses for Public Safety Communications

Remote - Fall 2012