The goal of Smart Silo project is to provide an effective and affordable solution for the need of modern and industrialized farms, of accurate and updated information about feed stocks. This data is crucial not only for the farmers to trace the feed consumed daily by animals or to generate the replenishment orders on time, but also for their suppliers to optimize feed production and delivery logistics plans.
The traditional telemetry solutions, designed originally for industry market, have not succeeded for this use case. The causes are the special characteristics of the farm (difficult access to a quality electrical grid, poor or no M2M coverage, bulk solids difficult to measure, etc.) and the limited budget available per silo. Consequently, and despite of his importance, the way the stocks are being controlled is manual and very inefficient. Usually, the farmers have to climb to the silos and make a visual estimation of stocks. This is a dangerous activity that also is not performed as often as it should, causing inefficiencies and disruptions in the business processes: lack of daily consumption information, urgent purchase orders caused by broken stocks, failure to properly plan the feed production, etc.
Our solution to the problem is Smart Silo, a READY-TO-USE, HIGHLY-EFFICIENT and LOW-COST platform for remote control of stocks in feed silos in the environment of a farm. It is composed of a new high-tech device and an advanced cloud platform for data acquisition and presentation. The following key features makes our platform an affordable and optimal solution for the use case:
- 3D scanning of feed surface for accurate measurements.
- Connection to Internet through a Wireless Sensor Network, allowing communications in areas of low or no coverage.
- Solar powered device, to be autonomous from electrical grid of the farm.
- Easy Plug&Sense installation.
- Free available apps (web, mobile and RESTFUL API).
- Low acquisition cost and zero maintenance.