Radar
How DSPii built a patented farming product using embedded services from Radinno Labs?
DSPii is widely recognized as a pioneer for providing personalized cloud-based Agarolytic solutions to farmers, renowned for their ability to enhance crop yields by 8% while simultaneously decreasing water usage in irrigated farmlands by 10%.
Their technology can efficiently scan 100,000 acres per day, effectively mapping soil characteristics, monitoring crop health, and promptly notifying farmers about optimal water and fertilizer needs. Furthermore, it aids in managing pest and pesticide applications.
DSPii’s solutions are aimed at enhancing both crop yields and reducing water usage while also facilitating the overall maintenance of the agricultural fields.
They wanted to compliment their cloud based solution with an IOT hardware.
So with their deep rooted RF expertise and research background they conceived a distinctive hardware for soil analysis.
And they developed a unique farming algorithm and patented it!
Then they set out to build the product with the following objectives:
Build a reliable and rugged hardware product that can perform soil analysis on an agricultural field.
The Hardware is to be mounted on a Drone to perform Radio Frequency measurements.
The patented algorithm involved a lot of data and math. Implemented part of it in the EDGE and the rest in the CLOUD to be effective.
Demonstrate the product to venture capitalists and raise funds for scaling.
DSPii being RF experts themselves designed and developed the RF hardware inhouse. Then they set out to find the ideal partner with demonstrated capabilities to build the rest of the system.
With only the algorithm as input they sought a team who can define and carry forward the implementation from ground up. That is when they virtually met Team Radinno. After attentively grasping their inputs, we started working on the development activities:
Building the product required a multidisciplinary expertise as it involved Embedded, RF and MATH processing elements. While DSPii themselves designed the RF hardware they needed support on the Digital hardware and the firmware.
Radinno’s unique team and experience were a perfect fit for the ask [In fact we succeeded where another team before us failed]. We picked the right components to design the digital hardware and architectured & developed a high performance firmware for the system.
In simple terms the product used radar to measure the soil parameters. But this was not an off-the-shelf radar technology. A completely custom RF protocol was in play. And it was mathematically related to a the large multi-antenna array on the hardware.
Radinno implemented the protocol on top of a BareMetal RF chipset to perform large bandwidth frequency SWEEP and MIMO signal processing on the antenna system and extract the radar data.
DSPii’s farming algorithm was the heart of the product and it involved heavy math processing on a large volume of data. They understood that implementing MATH from paper into a Firmware is an entirely different challenge.
Radinno drawing from it’s prior experience in RF and motor controller fields understood the algorithm; dissected it for the firmware keeping in mind the processor aspects and restriction s and successfully implemented the algorithm with ahigh degree of accuracy.
The product is targeted to operate over very large fields. And the RF design is intended to analyze the field to a great deal of accuracy. This meant the system used some high accuracy; high speed chipsets and generated pretty BIG DATA.
Radinno leveraged the full processing capabilities of the SoC along with Python scripting to implement effective data collection and edge analytics of the BIG DATA. Further more the implementation also had buffered local storage support.
The drone will be flown across the field at 120 KNOTS. The smallest area of measurement is 1 feet and the measurement time window is 1 millisecond. We are talking about serious speeds.
Radinno meticulously timed the implementation to synchronize the overall functionality with the flight operation. This required high speed interfaces, atomic data processing and real time operation.
Being a big product DSPii was constantly in discussions with VCs to raise the necessary capital to fund the development. So development timelines were driven by demo deadlines and stakeholder availability.
Radinno matched the development to the fund raising cycles and demo deadlines. The POC was developed in a week and the first prototype within a month to help DSPii hit all their stakeholder targets.
As DSPii took the prototype through field testing they tweaked the algorithm further to optimize it for the real world behaviors.
Radinno extensively supported them with the corresponding firmware modifications beyond the prototype phase travelling all the way to the deployment phase together with DSPii.
Team Radinno is awesome. Competent, always available for meetings and went out of their way to deliver an amazing product (firmware, custom c code, software defined radio). Just what the Dr ordered!