Building a Custom Solution for Farming
Long-Range Communication to Support Autonomous Micro-Tractors
Project Requirements
- Scaleable differential I2C communication
- Integrated power and data
- A hot swappable solution
Mission: Support Small Farms
As both a caver (a person who explores caves, often referred to as spelunking) for more than 30 years and an ambitious contributor to an open-source map project (OpenStreetMap (OSM)) since 2009, Eric Sibert has a long-standing passion for positional accuracy. In all that time, Sibert has been on a quest to find an accurate and portable tool that allows him to easily switch between these tasks - a quest that has proven to not be so simple.
To meet his requirements, he would need a tool that could be taken into remote caves, but also provide extreme accuracy for correcting street-level data. This dilemma ended up being a drawn-out and fruitless endeavor for quite some time. “I’ve been watching for years for potential GPS chips providing raw data at a low price. I made some attempts in the mid-2000s with the SiRF III chip.
“We’re really hoping to help develop a new standard of communication in robotics and automation using easy to use open source tools that anyone with arduino experience can get their hands on..."
Journey: Building a Hardware Solution for Plug-and-Play Long-Range Communication
To create the initial prototype for their idea, Farmhand had been working with SparkFun’s Differential I2C board. When they realized adding the ability to daisy chain the boards together would create a solution close to other industrial standard communication methods and reduce the overhead of needing to translate sensor data and commands into CAN format and back again, while still remaining compatible with open source I2C sensors, they reached out to SparkFun.
Through SparkFun’s services offerings, SparkFun designed a custom board to meet Farmhand’s needs.
By collaborating with SparkFun, Farmhand Robotics was able to turn their vision into reality. The QwiicBus MidPoint and QwiicBus EndPoint delivered on just what Farmhand was looking to create - scalable, differential I2C communication across multiple devices that integrates power and data communication over ethernet. As an added benefit, Farmhand doesn’t have to write custom drivers, everything is plug-and-play.
“The biggest benefit this project has to our system is that we can have secure data connections with open source sensors that already have Arduino libraries and drivers written, many by Sparkfun,” states Jones. “That was really the key for us, we knew the sensors we wanted to use, but as soon as you need to communicate over long distances in noisy environments things get complicated. The Qwiic Midpoint is going to solve a lot of that headache.”
With the QwiicBus MidPoint and QwiicBus EndPoint boards in hand, Farmhand Automation can now focus their efforts on bringing expanded automation and agtech to local farmers through autonomous micro-tractors and more.
As for working with SparkFun to design the board, Jones says “It can’t be understated the impact this has for us. The Sparkfun team has been great to work with. They are data driven, listen to our needs and collaborate really well.”
