Sensor Design
How ActivePots built a Hitech Agri IOT product using embedded services from Radinno Labs?
Activepots is on a mission to simplify the farming know-how for urban households. Based out of India, ActivePots caters to the desires of the dynamic urban younger generation, a rising community of passionate vegan advocates, and an increasing population of health-conscious urban couples. They are dedicated to serving the 78 million households in urban India by providing them with an uncomplicated, technology-driven farming solution that ensures their family’s food security.
Urban households can enjoy a range of advantages using ActivePots product, including smart cultivation techniques, user-friendly operation, the assurance of cultivating unfamiliar crops successfully, establishing future food security, and demonstrating a commitment to environmental well-being.
ActivePots is a team of diverse industry veterans trying to solve the imminent Food Shortage problem that the world is moving towards. They understood that the biggest blocker in solving the problem is the lack of farming knowledge among the current and newer generation of people.
Their vision is to use TECHNOLOGY to solve food shortage at a household level!
They conceptualized an innovative hardware product that would facilitate AI driven intelligent farming in urban households with little to no expertise required on the end users part. To that end they defined a clear set of objectives to build a product and take it to the market:
Users should be able to grow vegetables and fruits in their backyard or garden using ActivePots technology.
The Product should have cutting edge technology to create the kind of user experience the new gens are accustomed too.
Algorithm’ize the Know-how of cultivating crops at the CLOUD.
Setup trial deployments in the homes of the Founding team to demonstrate the product.
Energized by the vision ActivePots was in the process of putting together a expert team when they met Radinno Labs happenstance at an Expo.
True to our belief in innovative products we started brainstorming on the features, design and modelling [with no strings attached]. At the end of all the discussions, ActivePots put down some clear specs & objectives and we set out to execute them:
The product ActivePots envisioned needed the best of technology and design elements. They understood the need for a team who not only had an in depth experience in IoT technologies but can also research and innovate as needed.
Radinno, drawn to the vision of the product right from the word go, demonstrated proven capabilities along with the possibilities to innovate. Brain stormed and collaborated with the ActivePots team to come up with an array of design concepts. These designs were curated by ActivePots and meticulously crafted into the final product by Radinno.
ActivePots pitched the idea to angel investors early on and understood everyone wanted a Prototype demonstration to take the plunge.
Radinno accelerated the design and development activities to build a fully functional prototype within THREE MONTHS.
At the heart of the product is a Sensor used per plant. This sensor needed to have a wide operating range and accuracy. At the same time had to be inherently simple and mass producible. Off-the-shelf sensors proved inadequate in fulfilling all these prerequisites.
Radinno engineered a tailor-made sensor board using first principles of operation. The design was such that the operation was software controllable and calibratable taking into account the external factors surrounding the individual plant.
Households were the primary target market for the product. Yet ActivePots wanted to be able to position the product for Greenhouses, Nurseries and Roof garden markets too. This meant the possible deployment scenarios were a hotchpotch.
Radinno designed the product to support multiple deployment architectures like mesh, master-slave, pub-sub , daisy-chain etc. Both the hardware interfaces and the software were easily customizable to facilitate myriad deployment scenarios.
The product was conceptualized more like a networking device to create on-the-go user experience and necessitated versatile connectivity support that could be conveniently enabled or disabled as needed. Additionally a robust; re-routable communication protocol was necessary, considering the product’s deployment scenarios.
Radinno built-in multiple connectivity interfaces including WiFi, Ethernet etc. and implemented protocol stacks to facilitate mesh like communication between devices. The signal strength of the interfaces were optimized keeping in mind the target operating distances in typical deployment scenarios.
Running power supply to the product was a critical challenge especially in a distributed deployment scenario as it could easily make become cumbersome if done wrong. Here again ActivePots sought flexibility and robustness at the same time.
Radinno together with ActivePots team considered different power options and settled on Power-Over-Ethernet support. Furthermore the hardware was also designed to support the distribution of power from master device to slave devices and also featured a power adaptor interface for standalone deployments.
ActivePots understood that in spite of the tremendous value created by the product the cost of it is going to be major factor in the market.
Radinno worked diligent running through numerous component & connector specs to pick the right yet cost effective ones for the product.
Being an Agricultural product it’s exposure to dust and water elements were high. So, ActivePots wanted the product to IP67 compatible to ensure operational safety and ruggedness.
Radinno designed the hardware layout accordingly and used Epoxy PCB potting to ensure the product is IP67 compatibility .
Technology is just one half of the solution; Farming being the other. ActivePots is actively setting up trial installations and running crop experiments developing the AI models in the process.
Radinno continues to support the team with their experiments and manufacturing activities as needed to ensure the solution is fully matured and hits the market with a bang.
I wholeheartedly recommend Radinno Labs for any endeavor that requires technical expertise, commitment to excellence, high-quality execution, collaborative teamwork, effective communication, and genuine value addition. Working with Radinno Labs has been an absolute privilege, and I am confident that their contributions will continue to yield exceptional results for all fortunate enough to collaborate with them.