Real-Time Tractor App for Collecting Hay Baling Data
Case Studies / Arktos AG
Arktos AG
Arktos provides on site development of agricultural solutions. Their current product line revolves around IoT devices for tractors that allow farmers to increase yields through better decision making.
What problem did you solve?
We are running a large scale hay farm and were looking for ways to manage workers more efficiently, rather than calling them every few hours to check in.
Our initial goal was to be able to monitor tractor positioning and hay bale statistics (moisture, weight, slices) from a mobile app in real time so that we can get a high level view of our operations at any time.
"The CANedge2 is an excellent choice for securely and reliably getting CAN data off of any sort of agricultural vehicle"
How did you solve it?
We installed the CANedge2 (incl. GNSS/IMU) on each of our tractors and set it up to push data to S3 every 10 seconds. From there, we use AWS Lambda to DBC decode multiframe (ISO TP) ISOBUS data signals and store those in AWS RDS (Relational Database Service). Our mobile app then listens for updates and displays them as tractor and hay bale icons on a satellite map view - with visualizations of the bale statistics. The hay bale icons we display are color coded based on moisture so that stackers can stack high moisture bales separately. The initial application worked well, so we are now extending this to also use the CANedge2 in harrow beds, so that we can detect when the bales are picked up, stacked, and ready to be shipped from the field.
What benefit has this led to?
This has significantly reduced the workload of our hay operations managers, enabling workers to self manage to a greater extent - and allowing our operations managers to focus on other tasks. Additionally, we are using this data in combination with our inventory system to investigate sources of product loss and drive efficiencies for the operation.
Why did you choose the CANedge?
We chose the CANedge2 because of its excellent configurability, security, and robustness. We are able to provision a new CANedge2 device in less than a minute - including updated S3 security policies, device configuration file and certificate bundle.
— Andrew Miller, Founder, Arktos AG
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