A Comprehensive IoT Node Proposal Using Open Hardware. A Smart Farming Use Case to Monitor Vineyards

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a significant reduction in prices and an increased performance of electronic components, coupled with the influence of the shift towards the generation of open resources, both in terms of knowledge (open access), programs (open-source software), and components (open hardware). This situation has produced different effects in today's society, among which is the empowerment of citizens, called makers, who are themselves able to generate citizen science or build assembly developments. Situated in the context described above, the current study follows a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. In this way, it attempts to define a conceptual design of an Internet of Things (IoT) node, which is reproducible at both physical and behavioral levels, to build IoT nodes which can cover any scenario. To test this conceptual design, this study proposes a sensorization node to monitor meteorological phenomena. The node is called SEnviro (node) and features different improvements such as: the possibility of remote updates using Over-the-Air (OTA) updates; autonomy, using 3G connectivity, a solar panel, and applied energy strategies to prolong its life; and replicability, because it is made up of open hardware and other elements such as 3D-printed pieces. The node is validated in the field of smart agriculture, with the aim of monitoring different meteorological phenomena, which will be used as input to disease detection models to detect possible diseases within vineyards.

An IoT Platform Based on Microservices and Serverless Paradigms for Smart Farming Purposes

“…In addition, in the vineyard use case, a single implementation (a platform instance on a single server), as we have seen in the performance assessment, can support millions of IoT devices producing observations at the same instant. That implies thousands of farmers with various vineyard smallholdings can use the same server and save implementation costs (excluding the cost of the SEnviro nodes [33]).…”

“…It follows the same elements as the version presented in [32]. In this study, a new version detailed in [33] is used. the main features and improvements from the previous version are listed below.…”

Adapting Models to Warn Fungal Diseases in Vineyards Using In-Field Internet of Things (IoT) Nodes

“…In order to know what weather conditions are occurring in the fields, some SEnviro nodes have been used [11]. These nodes can be adapted to capture observations at different rates.…”

“…All these models use meteorological data generated by low-cost meteorological stations. To achieve this, the IoT nodes described in [11] (SEnviro) were used. These nodes contain low-cost sensors to monitor meteorological phenomena such as temperature, air/soil humidity, wind speed, wind direction and rainfall.…”

A Modular IoT Hardware Platform for Distributed and Secured Extreme Edge Computing

“…The traditional hardware solutions that were used in Wireless Sensor Networks mostly relied on de-facto standard sensor motes, such as Micas and TelosB [1], or similar approaches where 8-bit or 16-bit-based microcontrollers were integrated as the core of the wireless devices, to perform simple yet energy-efficient tasks for the target application. During the last decade tens of hardware platforms for the Extreme Edge [2] of the IoT have appeared with different elements and focusing on aspects such as low power consumption, high processing capabilities or open HW philosophy, among others [3]. Although these hardware platforms have been valid for many WSN application contexts, the ongoing revolution of IoT is pushing the hardware implementation towards the integration of more complex capabilities that allow tackling the challenges of smart and highly dynamic scenarios [4], particularly concerning the arising end-to-end IoT security issues with such an amount of expected Edge devices in place.…”