IoT: An Agriculture App to Analyze Soil Composition in Real Time

Customer

The company is a manufacturer of measurement instruments primarily for agricultural purposes, electronic sensors, and customizable solutions based on the near-infrared spectroscopy technology.

The customer’s portfolio includes a variety of hardware IoT solutions that facilitate the performance of harvesters, grain carts, slurry tankers, balers, etc.

Need

Partnering with HQSoftware, the customer wanted to develop a system that would allow for analyzing soil composition and submit reports right in the field. The application should be capable of visualizing the analysis results on the map in real time.

Challenges

Under the project, the team at HQSoftware had to address the following issues:

• As the solution was to aggregate data from nearly two million data points daily, our engineers needed to ensure unsurpassed scalability.
• The analyzed data should be visualized on a map in real time.
• On data gathering, an operator should be able to download a report and investigate the analysis results offline.

Solution

Developers at HQSoftware collected sensor data with Raspberry Pi and visualized it via an Android mobile application. Our team made it possible to streamline and visualize the results of soil composition analysis on the map in real time.

As a tractor drove through the field, an operator can track 35+ parameters, such as soil texture, structure, acid level, etc. Experts at HQSoftware ensured that it took a single second for the system to visualize constantly incoming data.

To provide an easy-to-use experience, our engineers enabled an operator to configure data visualization with a possibility to group soil parameters, distribute them by amount, and change their highlighting.

Developers at HQSoftware made it possible to visualize up to two million data points on a map with zero downtime.

Finally, our team automated report generation, so that an operator could download a ready-to-use map with all the soil parameters analyzed and visualized in a comprehensible manner.

Outcome

Collaborating with HQSoftware, the customer developed an application that gathers and analyzes soil composition across 35+ configurable parameters, as well as visualizes the results on a map in real time. The delivered solution is capable of aggregating data from two million data points daily with zero downtime. In the field, operators enjoy the possibility to download a ready-to-use map to further inspect the analysis results offline.

At the moment, the customer partnered with a private farm to equip 30 tractors with the delivered system. In the future, it is planned to move the application to the cloud.

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